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!

How To DJ In Ableton Live Part 2: Working With Clips, Setting Up Effects, Blending Songs from Ryan on Vimeo.

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.

NAMM, Booth 6920, Anaheim, CA (January 14, 2010) – iZotope will be demonstrating it’s newest award-winning plug-in,
Alloy, at the NAMM show. iZotope Alloy combines six essential sound shaping tools into one integrated interface. For more
information or a demo of Alloy, stop by NAMM booth 6920.Mix Magazine recently named Alloy a Mix Certified Hit and the plug-in was featured in MixBlog’s “Three Plug-ins We Like”. Alloy also
gained the attention of Pro Audio Review, who awarded it a 2009 PAR Excellence Award at the AES show in October.

Alloy includes six modules: Equalizer, Exciter, Transient, Dynamics, De-Esser, Exciter, and Limiter. Over 150 MacroPresets combine
Alloy’s modules into custom configurations for specific mixing situations, and each preset has a custom Macro layout showing the user
simple, useful controls for the task at hand. Advanced users can build their own layouts and move modules around in the signal chain to
customize the plug-in.

“With Alloy, we set out to make an ideal set of audio mixing tools with the same design philosophy, attention to detail, and
uncompromising sound quality that has made iZotope Ozone such an indispensible plug-in for mastering.” Says Nick Dika, Product
Manager at iZotope. “Alloy challenges the traditional ideas of what a ‘channel strip’ plug-in can do, and we’re extremely excited that
Alloy has been so well received by the press, by Ozone users, and by mixing professionals around the world.”

iZotope’s award-winning Ozone has become an industry standard for audio mastering, and now Alloy brings the company’s expertise
into the realm of mixing with completely new audio effects and workflow features designed for track and bus use. Alloy is designed for
any audio mixing application from professional recording and post-production studios to the home studio, and its uniquely configurable
interface helps pros work faster while giving less experienced users simple starting points for mixing.

Price and Availability
Alloy is distributed by iZotope and is available at authorized retailers for $249 MSRP. iZotope Ozone owners can cross-grade to Alloy for
only $149 directly from iZotope.

For more information, please visit http://www.izotope.com/.

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!

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!

Tweet #6470207566

OK – here’s a production question that I’ve sometimes wondered – at what point would it be appropriate to normalize sound levels during production? At the end would make sense, but I sometimes find I want
to normalize some of the raw audio before I start working with it.

The Answer:

Normalizing is sometimes flagged as one of those production “no-nos” and seen as rather taboo by some (maybe most) true engineers. I personally believe it has it’s applications, but I’d be careful not to over-do it.

In terms of music production…
I would personally avoid normalizing all together (and I do). Things will be loud enough once you get all the way through the mixing and mastering phases of any music project.

If you normalize all of your audio and then throw a brickwall limiter on your two track master during mastering, your stuff will be loud and not much more. If you need to make your audio or MIDI louder during production, use the faders! Use a gain plugin. Or, use your compressor’s makeup gain to make stuff a little louder.

That being said, if you still want to or feel like you need to normalize your audio, you should do it earlier rather than later.

In terms of post-production…
I don’t do a lot of music recording right now. Most of what I do falls under the “post” category. When I’m working on dialog editing/mixing for a web-based application, a podcast, or something that’s meant to be streamed rather than burnt to a CD, I’ll usually end up normalizing the audio I’m working on in order to please the client.

More often than not, when you’re working on audio for things like training videos, Internet-based training modules, etc, you’re working with marketing or business-minded people. They’re not real interested in what you do or what “direction” you have for the project. They simply want it to sound clean and be loud which is why normalizing audio for these purposes is often much easier than worrying about any type of brickwall limiting.

Producing music and mixing are highly subjective things. I personally don’t believe in any book of rules, so you should always take advice like this with a grain of salt perhaps. Ultimately it comes down doing whatever sounds the best and gets you the results you want.

I’ve been trying to get more “punch” and funkyness into my house-drums for a
long time now, but I just can’t seem to cut it. I’m looking for a sound like
Justice, Daft Punk, Moulinex, that kind of goodness.

I have been told compression is the way to go, but I simply can’t figure out
how.

Also – do you have any suggestions for free or cheap samplepacks for amateur
house-people like me?

With electronic music, a solid rhythm section (drums and bass) is 100% essential. If you don’t have those two elements going strongly in your track, you can forget about any DJs using it on the floor. So it’s no wonder why we get a couple of emails once and a while about improving your drum sounds.

It’s no secret that dance music is sample-based: many artists lift kicks, snares, and whatever else they can straight from records to use in their own productions. It’s not seen as shady or slimy, it’s just something that’s done. So for an “amateur” producer, good samples (probably taken from a sample pack) is key.

For proper samples, I suggest going to a site like Loopmasters, where sample packs tend to be of pretty high quality and reasonably priced. All sample packs have demo loops so you can at least get a basic idea of what the kit will sound like. All packs are sorted by genre(s), so it’ll be easy get started.

Once you’ve got proper samples and a decent composition you can start mixing. While compression is one factor to getting nice sounding drums, it’s not the only. If you’re not working with samples, there can be a lot of EQing, editing, and other processes that can be applied to drums to get them sounding punchy and tight. But since we’re only dealing with samples here, I’ll cover the popular compression techniques:

1. Sidechain Compression: Certain genres (electro/progressive house) rely heavily on lush synth sounds as well as a slamming kick. Routing the kick to the sidechain input of a synth, every time that kick hits it will duck the synth making the kick sound more pronounced and enabling it to cut through without battling the synth as much. I did a tutorial on it some time ago, so check it out at the bottom of the post.
2. Parallel Compression: Something every electronic music producer should explore: 1) buss all your drums to a stereo channel, 2) place compressor of your choice on said stereo channel, 3) set the buss compressor to something a little more than what you’d normally (feel free to go as extreme as you’d like), 4) blend in the dry (uncompressed) and wet (compressed) drums to your liking.
3. Distortion: Yeah, it’s not a compression method, but artists like Justice place distortion on a lot of different instruments in order to make them edgier/cut through the mix. Put a little distortion/white noise on top of your kick and snare just to see how it works.
4. Transient Shapers/Exciters: Plugins like the Oxford Inflator, Waves TransX, or the upcoming iZotope Alloy (which you will want) all have specific uses, mostly for increasing/molding your transients to get some different sounds.
5. Layering Drums: Layer multiple samples together. This isn’t just used in House music, either. Lot’s of Dubstep producers like to layer snare samples with white noise and claps among other things. Layer a snare with a really deep body with a more hi-pitched snare along with a clap. Try out different combinations until you find something that pops.

Getting solid sounding drums is not easy. It will take a lot of time and a lot of experimentation, but it’s worth it.

Automap Server

Novation’s Automap protocol has been out for a while, and as most Ableton users will tell you, its solid.  For their different Midi controllers, you can map automatically to the various plugins, mixer settings and instruments that you open in real time.

One of the seemingly more gimmick-aimed versions of their automap software resides on your iphone or ipod touch.  If you’ve got this $3 app and your device on the same wifi network as your workstation – then you’ve got DAW control on your phone.  I say it “seems” gimmicky because I had assumed any iphone app for so little money couldn’t possibly be practical and useful.  Automap on the iPhone, however, immediately became one of my new favorite tools.

Short Review:

Automap Controlling Pro Tools from an iPhone.

Automap on the iPhone/iPod Touch is cheap, easy to setup, relatively quick to learn and functional. It works great with any DAW that will accept MIDI based controls – Automap lets you use CC messages OR HUI protocol to control DAWs.  I used Logic Pro 9 and Pro Tools 8 LE with great results.

There are other apps like TrixMix or ProRemote on the iPhone that claim to have better UI/feature sets, but their also more expensive.

I had trouble getting panning control to work on my DAW Mixers, but considering what I’m using this control for (basic level setting and solo/mute/arm control when away from the computer – that’s not a big drawback.  Note: I got in touch with Novation’s customer support and they explained that DAW’s like Logic and Pro Tools require a kind of feedback for pan controls that Automap for the iPhone isn’t yet equipped to handle.  They assured me that they were aware of the issue and looking to fix it with an upcoming update.

On last quick note – all the links i followed to try to purchase automap 3.3 pro led me to a message saying I couldn’t purchase it in my country (U.S.) However the Novation Support team sent me this link to where automap pro is available for purchase. http://www.focusrite-estore.com/novation/software/automappro/

Hopefully none of you had this problem, and it’s just my own stupidity, but I figured I’d post it just in case.

More Details:

After downloading the app to my phone, I had to go to Novation’s Website to download the Automap Server Application.  It’s a relatively lightweight app that needs to be installed on any machine you wish to control with any automap controller (so if you’ve already got a Novation controller with automap features, then you probably already have this.)

Once that’s installed and running, you’ll have to do a bit of setup within your DAW to make sure everything’s communicating.  The User setup guides – available from within the Automap Server application are DAW specific and bare bones simple (in a good way).  In Pro Tools you’ll have to configure some Midi Settings by navigating to Setup>Midi>Input Devices…

Midi Input Settings for Pro Tools

Then just make sure “Automap HUI” and “Automap MIDI” are selected and “OK” it.

Then to configure the Pro Tools Mixer to accept Automap Mixer messages – navigate to Setup>Peripherals>Midi Controllers tab.

Automap Midi Controller Settings in Pro Tools

Set row #1 to read

• Type = HUI
• Receive From = Automap HUI
• Send To = Automap HUI
• #Ch’s = 8
  

Setting up Automap for Logic is quite different. First navigate in Logic to Logic pro>Preferences>Control Surfaces>Setup…

Then Select New>Install… from the menu of the window that pops up.  This will open another window with a list of potential control surfaces.  Choose the one labeled “Mackie Designs” and “HUI” and “HUI”

then click “Add”.

Then back in the Control Surfaces Window you can click on the little control surface icon that should have appeared.

Control Surface Icon

Then in the top left of that window, you can set the Output Port and Input Settings both to “Automap HUI.’

Output Port and Input Settings

Once you’ve taken care of that you can open up the Automap app on the iphone which takes you to the Server Page.

Automap Server Page

Here you should see all of the computers that have Automap Server running and are on the same wifi network as your phone.  (Oh yeah, your iPhone or iPod have to be on the same wifi network as your computer, so this won’t work with computers that are connected to a modem via ethernet cable.)

Choose which computer you want to control and the app opens the Groups View, which is where you choose which kind of mapping you want to load.  There are User Customizable, FX, Instrument, and Mixer mappings to choose from. User offers a mapping full of ready-to-assign CC controls, FX syncs to FX plugins you have open and Instrument allows you to take over instances of instrument plugins.  The Mixer mappings relate to the mixer and transport functions of your Daw.

Groups View

You might also have noticed the little “View” button. Tapping it toggles the Automap Server application running on your computer on and off.  Green means it’s visible on your computer screen and grey means it’s hidden.

Once you Select a Group, you get the “Browse View” which shows you a matrix of all the available mappings.  Depending on which group you selected and what you have running in your current session, you’ll see different things here.  For example, n one session I had 3 synths and an ultrabeat in the Instruments group.  While in another session I had 4 EXS24  sampler instruments listed.

Browser View

The Mixer Group took me to the Browser View you see above – only one option.  HUI is the protocol designed by Mackie and accepted by many DAWs for control surfaces to control mixer functions.  Well it does more than that, but that’s the short answer.  Choose this option and you’ll be shown the Control View of the DAW’s mixer.

Automap Controlling Pro Tools from an iPhone.

As you can see, in this view I have two sliders and 8 buttons.  (No matter what you’re controlling, this is the layout you’ll see.  Unfortunately, Automap on the iPhone is not customizable in this respect.) This Layout works for channel strips with volume and pan on sliders – record arm, mute and solo, on buttons.  Two other buttons are bank left and right, which allow you to move your control from faders 1-8 to 9-16 to 17-24, etc.

The two Page buttons marked “<” and “>” allow you to move from fader 1 to 2 to 3, etc. within each bank of 8.

A simple workflow where this would come in handy would be to throw up a session with enough tracks to handle all your inputs.  Then you can arm and solo tracks from your phone to hear them as you do mic placements without having to run back and forth to your computer.  That’s just one scenario,  but I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

I haven’t had a chance to try using Automap to do automation – although I’m guessing there might be some gnarly lag trying to make that work.  Stay tuned, and I’ll post and update about that.

Harrison's Mixbus

Harrison – maker of fantastic analog and digital consoles – has released it’s own take on the DAW, which begs the question Who cares?

But what makes this particular workstation unique is it’s design philosophy.  Mixbus was built as a customized version of Ardour, and re-introduces engineers to something simultaneously frustrating and inspiring: Limitations.

Harrison gives us a DAW that mimics an analog console.  They call it a “knob per function” design, which basically means each knob does one thing and only one thing. There’s also only four stereo mix buses for grouping and effects, which seems like a pain, but it’s a blessing in disguise.  How many times have you been asked to put 20 different kinds of verb on a single track? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to honestly say “I can’t do that?”

The other and perhaps most important benefit of having a limited DAW is the way limitations force you to get creative and thoughtful with your mixing. Choosing a reverb becomes an important decision when you’ve only got space for one.

Here’s a list of details from the Harrison Site:

Mixbus Features:

• Straightforward “knob per function” mixer layout based on Harrison’s renowned 32-series and MR-series music consoles.
• Precision DSP algorithms for EQ, Filter, Compression, Analog Tape Saturation, and Summing based on Harrison’s world-renowned large format analog and digital mixing consoles.
• Unlimited stereo or mono input channels (based on available CPU power) featuring High-pass Filter, EQ, Compression, and 4 Mix Bus sends on every channel.
• 4 Stereo Mix Buses (can be used for groups or auxes) featuring Tone controls, Compression, Sidechaining, and Analog Tape Saturation.
• Stereo Master Bus that features Tone controls, Analog Tape Saturation, K-meter, and Limiting to help you make polished mixes.
• Plugin delay compensation to support effects such as parallel compression.
• Comprehensive “at-a-glance” metering with peak, peak hold, and compressor gain reduction visible on every track and bus.
• Extensive DAW features via the Ardour Digital Audio Workstation.
• Supports AudioUnit plugins and any CoreAudio interface.
  

This Daw looks awesome, and for $80 – it’s worth a shot if you’re trying to make the jump from analog console to DAW.