Sampling Frequencies & Bit Rates: 96 v 44.1Khz & 24 v 16bit by Stephen Powell

I had a conversation recently with a guy who described himself as a “glitch-dubstep-lo-fi composer” He went on to describe a couple of his tracks which turned out to be pretty much what you might expect from such a description. When I asked him about his production he said to me: “I make all my tracks with a low sampling-rate and bit-rate for the whole project”. At this point I was a bit confused and so asked him to elaborate. Apparently all his samples and synthesisers were imported / played automatically at 22,050Khz sampling rate with 12bit bit-rate. The entire project was also set at those values. Now utterly dumbfounded I asked his reasoning. “Because I want everything to sound really grungy and lo-fi” was the response. I queried if his computing power was any issue and he replied that his computer was top notch and that he could set a project at top rates if he wanted to. What he did complain of however was a problem in getting any kind of depth or warmth in his tracks.

After returning home after this perplexing chat I got onto the internet and checked out his music on SoundCloud. The result was what I had expected: a flat and poor quality sounding collection of tracks. The actual composition was damn good including some fantastic rhythm lines with great syncopation and groove. The harmony and melody aspect was all well presented, the bass-lines all evolving and suitably Dub-steppily wobbly and wonky with some interesting twists. The mixes were balanced, clear and well compressed. Yet all the sounds were lifeless, lacking in depth and had a serious hole where a big dollop of Dub-step phatness should be.

The reason I felt such confusion whilst chatting to this guy was because the idea of intentionally downgrading the quality of the sound before doing anything else to a piece of music is a complete mystery to me. Distortion, bit-crushing and over-driving sounds is a great way to manipulate sound and for getting new ones, but the great thing about them in this instance, and with all effects really, is that you have the choice to put them on. With a clean recording, well edited samples and as high a quality environment as possible to compose or produce in, you have all the options in the world for putting sounds through the mill as far as you like. However, if you start a track with viciously over-compressed drum hits, hugely overdriven synthesiser samples and gnarly super limited bass, that’s all you have to work with. You can never get back lost dynamics, a clean signal of an distorted instrument, or the quality stripped away by bit crushing.

Simply enough, the guy I had chatted to had an idea about what he wanted to achieve and then set about getting it in completely the wrong way. It’s an easy mistake to make thinking that because a really heavy distorted sound in a track you like sounds fantastic that applying a massive amount of distortion will produce the same or similar sound; sadly, it doesn’t. Whilst it’s a bit of a blunt saying, put rubbish in, get rubbish out. Fill in the word rubbish with whatever you like here. To illustrate this, you could take say a sustained power chord from a guitar and make two copes in your DAW on separate tracks, both recorded at 24bit, 96kHz quality. Take one and convert it to say, 128kbps mp3. Then place identical guitar-amp plug-ins such as Logics amp simulations and see which one can be made to sound beefier. You can replicate this with a high quality synthesiser sound or perhaps a vocal take. Listen back carefully and notice the difference in texture, depth and richness that the better one offers, especially after being put through effects. 96Khz, 24bit sound compared to mp3 is quite extreme but it simply points out the difference quality can make. I’m not saying you need pristine audio to make great records, just that if you have the quality, why throw it away?

Scratch just a tiny way into the surface of music technology and you will be sure to come across the continual discussion between the benefits of digital and analogue equipment. Just a few decades ago, digital technology was in many ways the holy grail of music production. No more wow and flutter from tape and synthesisers that didn’t need tuning and saveable settings rather than having to jot down parameter values. Also, the possibilities of digital sampling and not needing to have to hire musicians made many producers weak at the knees. However, it was not to be. As soon as musicians discovered that samples could nowhere near play like musicians, and that memory capacity and computing power was only capable of using inferior sounds, they breathed a sigh of resignation and got back on the phone to their favourite instrumentalists. The good thing here is that many new styles of music grew out of these restrictions, but that’s another story. Even worse though than not having the facilities to achieve what digital audio promised, it was soon seen that things were a very long way off in terms of audio quality. Skip to the present and we have the ability to accurately sample instruments with velocity layers, multiple voices, anti-machine gun facilities and probably more computing power than all the first batch of music computers put together. Yet still a trained ear can tell the difference between a sampled instrument and a real one and it has to be a pretty good impression to fool anyone. I slightly digress, but it all goes to say that quality is good and should be maintained.

Another consideration on the quality of sound when making music on computer is the soft synth. Once again digital audio doesn’t quite manage to make the grade of analogue. Don’t get me wrong, I think digital sounds fantastic, it’s all I use and I’ve never owned an analogue synthesiser in my life, but I do know how great they sound. One of the major reasons why they sound better is harmonics. Because the electrical circuits in analogue synthesisers is imperfect, it creates slightly imperfect signals. This is how the warmth and richness of analogue shines through. In comparison digital is too perfect, simply a collection of ones and zeros re-created into an imitation of the result of an electrical circuit. It’s this warmth, or lack of it which helps explains another example. To imitate analogue warmth there are plug-ins to imitate it, or other methods such as putting a sound through a tube driven guitar amp and re-recording it to give it some bite. Simply enough, the more pristine detail that a digital sound has, i.e. the higher its sampling rate, the more harmonics it then has to warm or ‘excite’ to give it that all important tone.

Just to point you in the right direction, I suggest to all digital musicians to make the following precautions. Always work with the highest bit-rate and sampling rate that your system will allow. If this means occasionally having to freeze a track or even bounce a number of tracks to re-import as audio, so be it. Always record at the highest rates you can and don’t downgrade that signal until the very last step, i.e. dithering and conversion in the mastering stage. Make sure that no equipment or software you use downgrades audio quality. Don’t sacrifice audio quality for hard disk space with audio libraries. After all, hard disk space is as cheap as chips these days, take advantage. If you have to convert, make sure you do it the longest but best quality setting.

Most importantly in all this, don’t let poor quality limit your choices with music making. Always make sure you can take your pick for as long as you can before losing that possibly all vital quality. After all It’s better to have the option of measuring twice and cutting once. If you come to the end of your track and still want to filth it up worse than the most distorted gabba ever made, please do, and you’ll be glad you have the option. Also, spare a thought for the poor sods in the early eighties shaving milliseconds off the audio tail of a sample to save precious kilobytes so that they can have six instruments in one track rather that five.

I asked top engineer, Ableton guru and GSS tutor Al Riley to continue the debate. Which DAW is best – Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton or Cubase?

My first multitrack workstation was my 4-track Portastudio (not a DAW, an AAW I suppose?), which gave me the novel luxury of changing the volume and panning different instruments after recording them! I could even use insert effects (a guitar pedal) and punch-in recording to fix questionable guitar solos. Things got a bit psychedelic after I realised I could record backwards audio by flipping the tape…

Next up, the combination of Windows 95 Sound Recorder and a cover disk demo of FruityLoops v1 was the basis of much experimentation on the family PC. That would have been my first go at making sample-based tunes.

Shortly after that I installed Cubase VST on my own cheap PC which was a revelation. Editing, recording, insert effects, automation (if somewhat limited) all in the same program. Although I think I could only manage about 10 tracks before the machine fell over, I can remember being blown away by how much you could do on a home computer. I got myself a dedicated soundcard, a MIDI keyboard and a C1000 mic and felt like there was already a mind-boggling world of possibility.

My first ever job in the music industry was as studio assistant for Coldcut. One of my first tasks for was to resurrect the classic audiovisual collage track ‘Timber’ for use in their upcoming live shows. As it was originally made in the mid-90s I had to record out all the parts from the Akai S1000 samplers being triggered from a Mac running a MIDI-sequencer (possibly an early version of Logic). That’s when I realised how easy I’d had it joining the digital audio game after the creation of software samplers…

At that time (2004) Coldcut were starting to use Ableton Live for their live shows and it was already becoming a weapon of choice for studio production too. I think that must have been around version 3 or 4. Features such as elastic audio and session view were so innovative and I fell in love with this new approach to a DAW. The icing on the cake was the intuitive instant mapping of MIDI and qwerty key commands. Suddenly audio felt less rigid and like something you could manipulate and mould. To me Ableton feels like it has an element of play even when you’re using it for serious work.

As I moved towards working in professional recording studios it became clear that becoming proficient in Pro Tools was an absolute must. After that initial learning curve you get with all new DAWs, it became clear that this was a powerful beast. Where it succeeded (and i think this was version 7.1) was  with a clear sterile lab-like visual layout, with extremely powerful and precise editing capabilities. Also, so much of the Pro Tools workflow is geared towards staying organised and keeping things simple. That is invaluable when you find yourself in high pressure sessions. All in all Pro Tools feels solid and I think the fact that you could only use it with qualified audio interfaces has done a lot for that reputation. It’s going to be interesting to see how version 9 is received now it can run with any soundcard.

Nowadays I do nearly all of my work in Ableton and Pro Tools. Generally, any editing or mixing will be the reserve of Pro Tools whereas Ableton will be the one if I’m composing or coming up with ideas. That said, improvements in both mean there is more and more overlap: Pro Tools now has an amazing elastic audio engine, and more bundled instruments and effects, and Ableton has more and more grouping and editing features. I still think Ableton is absolutely unbeatable for live performance and the recent addition of The Bridge for linking Serato Scratch with Live is perfect for laptop DJs wanting to do more interesting things with their live sets.

So that’s my vote: Pro Tools and Ableton Live.

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Build a synthesizer | THINK, MAKE, PLAY | Max/MSP. article by Mr Steve Powell

What’s the first thing you do when starting a new track or build a synthesizer on your computer? Fire up Logic or Max/MSP? Warm-up the TB808? Sit on top of a hill and hope musical inspiration hits you whilst pondering the meaning of existence? Any of those things would do, but if you’re like most people, you sit in front of a blank screen wondering where to start for at least ten minutes. If it’s a bad day you sit there for hours, not getting anywhere. One of the hardest things about making music can be trying to force inspiration when it won’t come. Sometimes you can kick yourself into it, sometimes writers block is as stubborn as a mule. There is avenues of relief though, and some of them don’t involve vegging in front of the TV or raiding the fridge for the fifteenth time that day. Carrying on in part from my last article, I will try and give some food for thought about ways of being creative with music.

As I see it, there are three main things to stifle the inspiration of the creative music maker, presuming you have all the stuff and are ready to go; not knowing what to do, not knowing how to do it, and being worried that what you do is going to be any good. Well, for the last one I can answer it really quickly… everything you do is good because being productive is good and the next time you do something it will be even better. In this article though I’m going to dig into the first, and partly the second stifling factors. If you are lucky enough to have a Roland TB808 as the guy in the first paragraph, you pretty much know what’s going to happen. You select a drum, press a button in the sequencer and you make a drum groove. That’s what 808’s are, and so it doesn’t take long before you’re in Detroit Techno heaven, and that’s why they’re great: focus. So… what does a computer do? Well, lots of stuff. You’ve got three hours to make some music so you may start at the synthesiser. Or perhaps the sequencer, or record some samples for the sampler. Maybe buy a sample pack, or download some new loops for inspiration, or one of the massive variety of programs at your disposal, and that’s before you even get into the program itself or write a note. The conclusion? Choice is a great thing but also, it can be a bad thing. Conventional wisdom says to find one or two instruments and a few effects and learn them inside out so you can use them really well. This is a fine way to go about limiting your options so you can concentrate on doing rather than deciding. There is more than one way to skin a synth though, and the way I’m going to explain does the job of helping decide what to do and teaching you how to do it at the same time. The answer? DIY.

We’re not going to be putting up flat-pack or hammering in nails but in practice it’s not too different than doing just that on a computer. Often as not, after learning how to use a music program, getting it to do exactly what you want can be tricky, or even impossible. Most of the time there is a work-around or some kind of compromise, but often as not we don’t want a compromise; we want it exactly how we want and it seems those functions should be clear, accessible and functional. I personally find that I often use huge programs in a very simple way and have no need of all the bells and whistles it offers. Then when the trial period is over and you find yourself with a potentially big bill for doing something simple it can grind a bit. Therefore another big bonus to making it yourself is that it can be as simple or as complicated as you like, although if you fancy making a fully functional commercial DAW it may be worth letting the entire however-many-strong Apple development team do it for you. Right then, back to the title… think, make, play.

I’m going to skip over the actual thinking process here, just to say that whether it’s on the aforementioned hill, on the toilet or in the hazy morning after the night before, ideas will come, usually when not expected. When you have one, break it down to find where to start. An example of this started with a problem given to me by a guy who wanted a little plug-in design help in Max/MSP. He wanted a gizmo to read the pitch of whatever instrument he was recording (usually guitar and voice) and to play harmonising notes in real time through any synth, whilst recording the audio, and the midi notes into Logic. The choice of program (instrument) on the synth and the type of harmonisation was to be controlled by a midi foot pedal. Step one: Get all the routing done so all the midi and audio runs to the right places. Two: Set up pitch detection. Three: Set the pedals to control harmonisation and program change. Four: Test, debug, tweak. Five: Graphic User Interface Design. Doing all this is of course a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the process in a nutshell. During this process I had two great ideas that I decided to put into practice in my own performance software: An arpeggiator that creates harmonised delay lines of incoming audio by reading the pitch, and using pedal combinations to create shifting harmonic lines around the main melody. So by making something for someone else, I got great ideas just when I wanted a new gizmo to play with.

The main point I make here is that synthesiser design, sampler design, FX design and pretty much any tool you can think of design can take us in new and interesting directions, and can really beat those blank page blues. Also, for those of us that want to do something a bit different, or really stamp their identity by doing something in a new way, try a new angle. Try this thought for size: Why adapt your music to someone else’s system when you can adapt a system to your music? After all, the music is what it’s all about. Don’t compromise your music, change the system to suit it best.

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New Approaches: Max/MSP Digital Synthesiser Building in electronic music production (EMP) by our course designer and instructor Steve Powell: 11/1/11

Everyone has different ways of writing music whether you sit down with your guitar, play and hum until you get something you like, or draw out some beats in Reason. However, one thing that many electronic music production (or EMP) composers often have in common is linearity in their music making. What I mean by this is that when you sit down in front of a sequencer and program in some notes, you’re placing them on the timeline of a song which you can see from start to finish on your screen. When you’re writing a song on an instrument, you fill in the verses and choruses on a timeline, one after another.
This fashion of writing is as old as the hills and is probably the most tried, tested, natural and widely used way of composing. The mixing desk and the tape recorder were even more linear in that at first you couldn’t go back to alter the recording. You played the part from start to finish and to alter anything was a whole new take. When computer music as we now know it evolved, as soon as computing powerbecame able to imitate the environment of the mixing desk and the step sequencer it did so. This was mainly because the companies making the software had to try and coax guys who had been using studio gear all their careers into buying the software, and the best way to get them into computers was relating what was happening on-screen to what they knew.

So… We are now in the position that the vast majority of commercial electronic music production (EMP) software is based on a linear timeline. Some of this software is truly astounding and they allow you to do all kinds of incredible things, and it’s getting better all the time. I love some of these programs and have dedicated much of my time in learning to use them and composing using the linear timeline. However, it’s not the only way to do things. There are simply some things that a sequencer cannot do, or at least cannot do without a great deal of effort. Even more importantly though is that doing things differently opens up so many new music making possibilities.

Much of doing things a different way is a change in perception, or coming at it from another angle. Take this as a simple example; to represent the standard house beat on a sequencer, you could write out:

Kick:
x—x—x—x—|x—x—x—x—|
Snare:
—-x——-x—|—-x——-x—|
Hi-Hat:
–x—x—x—x-|–x—x—x—x-|

This is, to put it in drummer terms, a four to the floor kick drum with an off- beat hi-hat, with a snare on the second and fourth kick. To think of it in linear terms, you could say it is a kick, then a hi-hat after half a beat, then a kick and a snare after another half beat etc. To look at it from a global perspective of the timeline, you could say there are eight kick drum hits, equally spaced over the course of eight beats, starting on the first beat. The hi-hat is the same but starting on the first half beat, and there are four snares equally spaced, starting on the second beat. That’s a very long way of saying it though isn’t it? That kind of pattern can be described very concisely in a textual programming language but that’s not what this article is about.

In Max/MSP electronic music production software (EMP) this drum pattern could be made by a using an object called a counter that counts upward four times per beat. Once it gets to a specified number, it starts again, say after sixteen quarter-beats, one 4 /4 bar. With this in mind it is simple to make the program play a kick drum when the counter hits ‘one’, plus every fourth quarter-beat after, a hi-hat when it hits ‘three’ plus every fourth quarter-beat after, and the snare on ‘five’, but only repeating every eighth quarter-beat. With the counter looping you have the same musical effect as before, but with no visible timeline. This may seem just a different way to get the same effect and it is, but the perspective is different and the system is different. From here can add two more counters, one resetting after eight beats and the other resetting after eleven. Attach a few more sounds to be triggered on the other counters on different beats. Make one counter count at a different speed. Make the other stop for eight beats in- between it’s normal count. From these simple parameters you can make some crazy sounding beats and musical phrases that you may have never thought of before which would be very time consuming in a normal sequencer, and would probably take ten years of drum practice to reproduce in the acoustic world! Beats and timing aren’t the only thing to mess around with though. Melody, harmony, timbre, synthesiser parameters, whatever you like. You can pretty much create or change anything you want to. Want to import a picture of your studio and have the picture colours dictate the notes of your track? Do it. Want to have different notes played from your guitar set off different drum loops? You can do that as well. Trying something apart from the timeline can reap great rewards, especially in inspiration and being able to have an idea for music and putting it into action.

Don’t get me wrong here, I love to sit down with Ableton and make some dance music or write a song and record it into Logic. They are amazing programs and do what they do so well along with many others. But I also love to have the chance to break away from the mixers and sequencers and do something completely different, or do an new take on an old idea and that’s where I find Max/MSP comes in. One final thought to send you away with; how many times have you been writing music on a computer and thought “Why won’t this program let me do this thing that way?” Well, here’s your chance to make it that way.

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Which DAW is better – Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton or Cubase?:

Okay I don’t suppose I am the first nor will I be the last to raise this question that is which DAW is best out of Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton or Cubase but here is part one of my thoughts and coming up soon, part two and the thoughts of music production school tutors, Al, George and Paul.

When I very first started in the olden days (early 90′s) we all used Atari ST’s with a whole 512k of Ram for sequencing Midi and not much else. Obviously all audio was dealt with using 24 track 2″ tape with up to 3 slaved together synchronised with lynx synchronisers. Back then for sampling, we had the classic Akai S900 and S950 and later the Akai S1000. I went freelance as an assistant as soon as possible as I got on well and was in demand from engineers and producers but didn’t get on so with with the management who ran the studios. Lisa and Maddy at the Roundhouse were the exception there – they went on to manage me when I went freelance as a mix engineer.

The two most popular sequencers were Steinberg’s Cubase and Emagic’s Notator. from what I remember, Notator looked like the event list in Logic and that was it. Cubase on the other hand was a lot more intuitive giving us the ability to drag, drop, copy and paste blocks of midi information. Later on Emagic changed the name from Notator to Notator Logic then finally settled at Logic long before Apple bought them out of course. I think before Notator, they were called Creator but let’s not go there! Speaking of Apple, in those days Macs were quite new on the music production scene and Atari ST’s were always thought of as more stable, and they were rock solid timing wise. So back then, Cubase was my sequencer of choice and I zipped around on it like lightning as I knew it so well.

Towards the mid 90′s Macs were creeping in, they were better computers, even better than the Atari ST 1040 model, they had colour screens and it wasn’t long until we had the capability to record and edit audio to a degree. I remember once I was on a session with a producer called Ian Green at Metropolis Studios and two things stuck out; the fact that we were using a rack of Akai S1000 samplers so high, they were taller than Ian – he isn’t the tallest bloke but still. Obviously the more samplers you have, the more outputs to plug into the desk and more importantly, in those days, the more sample time you had. I think we had lots and lots of backing vocals and he wanted to keep all the harmonies separate triggered of course from the Atari ST running Cubase. We were chatting about computers with audio capability and I guess the first DAW. I’ll always remember that when we touched on audio capability, Ian asked me about plugins. I looked at him with a blank face because I had no idea what plugins were!

When I look at these dates as I’m writing this, unless I’m way off, things were moving FAST!!!! I think now with my 8 processors in my Mac Pro where five years ago it was a dual 1.8 PPC, I’m still doing the same thing on it, i’m just not thinking so hard about being economical with plugins and the plugins then were not so juicy as they are now. That’s the only difference between 5 years ago and now really. That and that people are finally realising that that the concept of DSP to be done outside of the computers processor is a dated one. Avid (used to be Digidesign) have a new generation of gear out now along with their Pro Tools 9. I really must make the effort to see what they have come up with. I do know that Pro Tools 9 software works on any audio interface which should be good news for some.

Okay went slightly ahead of myself there, sorry about that – back to the olden days; as macs were used more and more, Emagic Logic was emerging and at one point overtook Cubase, there was no question of that, because for some reason Emagic Logic and I think around version 3 was much better on a mac than Cubase was on a mac, and by this time, macs were the way forward. People then were mostly either using Cubase on an ST or Emagic Logic on a Mac.

Cubase as it was in the early 1990's

Around about this time I could see macs running Logic were much better than Atari ST’s running Cubase so I switch and had to learn Logic. I learnt Logic by changing all the Logic key commands to Cubase key commands. I was amazed you could do that at the time and it certainly gave me a head start. All the key commands were stored in the one preferences file, and I would have easy access to my preferences file with my key commands because I had emailed them to my Hotmail account. By this time a dial-up internet connection was usually in most studios’ office and I thought I was 1 bad ass ground breaking mofo!

For many years Emagic Logic on a Mac was by far the best all round DAW. Cubase had lagged behind massively, the MIDI in Pro Tools was appalling and Ableton was in its infancy and no one had heard of it. There was a period when I beta tested Logic for Emagic, which means that they would send me updates first before releasing them to the public to go over, and give them my feedback – I would try and make it break by pushing it as hard as I could, tell them the results of the tests and also tell them if I thought any of the new features were any good. In 2002, Apple bought Logic from Emagic so that all stopped and I guess they have guys in white coats beta testing full time. You can tell this because of some of the stupid features they come out with, like the comp tool and the loop end tool to name just a few. AND WHY CAN’T WE STILL AFTER ALL THE YEARS NOT ADJUST THE SIZE OF A REGION FROM THE LEFT??? Anyway, I’m not here to grump but I think if they had more people actually making music involved in the development, it’d STILL be the obvious choice DAW but it isn’t now.

It’s only recently and I’m talking in the last 5 years Ableton has emerged as a contender with its intuitive and very creative session mode and warp marking, although now we warp the audio instead of the grid in version 8, warping has been around for a long time now. I’ve been warping multi-track drums now for a while in Ableton. I’m currently working on a sample based record with Russ Jay and I warped the sample in Ableton because it wasn’t originally played to a click, it’s that old. Logic have come up with Flextime but it really is ‘Happy Shopper’ in comparison.

It’s only recently and I’m talking in the last 5 years that Cubase has massively improved, particularly its audio. A friend of mine was showing me the way Cubase deals with the audio in a completely unique way just as Pro Tools’ playlist system is so different. Again in the last 5 years, Pro Tools’ MIDI has upped its game massively and now there’s not much you can’t do in Pro Tools you can do in Logic, and I know nothing about Pro Tools 9 which is bound to have further MIDI improvements.

It was around 7 years ago I sold my Digidesign HD3 and 192 system and swapped it for a G5 dual 1.8 with an Apogee interface. There were a few times my dual 1.8 PPC struggled and I wondered if I had done the right thing but I struggled through. Now I have my 8 x 2.8 intel, I can’t understand why anyone would need Pro Tools DSP on PCI cards these days, especially now Pro Tools 9 software supports any interface. I do wonder if Avid have shot themselves in the foot there, I do hope not and pat them on the back for giving people more options. I’m sure there’s more to it than doing it out of the goodness of their heart!

My first multitrack workstation was my 4-track Portastudio (not a DAW, an AAW I suppose?), which gave me the novel luxury of changing the volume and panning different instruments after recording them! I could even use insert effects (a guitar pedal) and punch-in recording to fix questionable guitar solos. Things got a bit psychedelic after I realised I could record backwards audio by flipping the tape…

Next up, the combination of Windows 95 Sound Recorder and a cover disk demo of FruityLoops v1 was the basis of much experimentation on the family PC. That would have been my first go at making sample-based tunes.

Shortly after that I installed Cubase VST on my own cheap PC which was a revelation. Editing, recording, insert effects, automation (if somewhat limited) all in the same program. Although I think I could only manage about 10 tracks before the machine fell over, I can remember being blown away by how much you could do on a home computer. I got myself a dedicated soundcard, a MIDI keyboard and a C1000 mic and felt like there was already a mind-boggling world of possibility.

My first ever job in the music industry was as studio assistant for Coldcut. One of my first tasks for was to resurrect the classic audiovisual collage track ‘Timber’ for use in their upcoming live shows. As it was originally made in the mid-90s I had to record out all the parts from the Akai S1000 samplers being triggered from a Mac running a MIDI-sequencer (possibly an early version of Logic?). That’s when I realised how easy I’d had it joining the digital audio game after the creation of software samplers…

At that time (2004) Coldcut were starting to use Ableton Live for their live shows and it was already becoming a weapon of choice for studio production too. I think that must have been around version 3 or 4. Features such as elastic audio and session view were so innovative and I fell in love with this new approach to a DAW. The icing on the cake was the intuitive instant mapping of MIDI and qwerty key commands. Suddenly audio felt less rigid and like something you could manipulate and mould. To me Ableton feels like it has an element of play even when you’re using it for serious work.

Logic Pro 9 as it is now in 2010

As I moved towards working in professional recording studios it became clear that becoming proficient in Pro Tools was an absolute must. After that initial learning curve you get with all new DAWs, it became clear that this was a powerful beast. Where it succeeded (and i think this was version 7.1) was  with a clear sterile lab-like visual layout, with extremely powerful and precise editing capabilities. Also, so much of the Pro Tools workflow is geared towards staying organised and keeping things simple. That is invaluable when you find yourself in high pressure sessions. All in all Pro Tools feels solid and I think the fact that you could only use it with qualified audio interfaces has done a lot for that reputation. It’s going to be interesting to see how version 9 is received now it can run with any soundcard.

Nowadays I do nearly all of my work in Ableton and Pro Tools. Generally, any editing or mixing will be the reserve of Pro Tools whereas Ableton will be the one if I’m composing or coming up with ideas. That said, improvements in both mean there is more and more overlap: Pro Tools now has an amazing elastic audio engine, and more bundled instruments and effects, and Ableton has more and more grouping and editing features. I still think Ableton is absolutely unbeatable for live performance and the recent addition of The Bridge for linking Serato Scratch with Live is perfect for laptop DJs wanting to do more interesting things with their live sets.

So that’s my vote: Pro Tools and Ableton Live.

I worry that Logic is becoming a jack of all and master of none. In recent years they have copied others but not as well. ‘Flextime’ is a poor ‘Warpmarking’, their ‘convert audio region to sample track’ is a poor recycle. You would have thought with the might of Apple behind them, they would at least give the competition a run for their money when they copy them!

I do hope Apple pull their socks up with Logic because I’m far too old and busy with other things now to go to the trouble of learning another DAW to the same standard.

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Antares Autotune pitch correction software on Xfactor shows:

I had a chap called Will Payne from the Sunday Mirror contact me and ask if I could spot any Antares Auto-tune pitch correction software on Susan Boyle’s pre-recorded audition performance of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ on Britain’s Got Talent, which is a Simon Cowell show like Xfactor. He gave me two Youtube links to analyse – one of the pre-recorded audition which apparently had been Auto-tuned and one of a performance in the live final which can’t have been as it was live. I did point out at this point that you can run Antares Auto-tune pitch correction software live in real time.

Audition pre-record performance HERE

Live final performance HERE

I listened to both, one after the other trying not to analyse the vocal tuning too much. The first thing I realise is that overall the performance from the live final seemed to be much better than the pre-recorded and allegedly tampered with audition. Because Auto-tune can tune in real time, why the accusations only for the pre-recorded shows? The performance was so much better in the final so there’s more chance they were using it then than the audition anyway! Having said that, Autotune doesn’t cope well with vibrato and this big old bird loves a bit of vib. I put the improvement down to her being more relaxed and used to singing in front of an audience. I’m assuming there are endless rounds where everyone has to sing and each week one gets knocked out each week until just a few are left in the final. Does she sing the same song every single week?

Someone who can’t sing at all asked me if I could make them sound like a great singer using pitch correction software, and my reply was that I could probably make you sound 20% better almost immediately and if I was left with your lead vocal performance for a a few hours with Melodyne or in the old days Auto-tune in graphical mode (how tedious was that?), I could probably make you sound around 40% – 50% better. The point is that you have to be pretty good in the first place to sound great. Over the years I can probably count the amount of times I haven’t used Auto-tune on a vocal on one hand – from the very best in the business to the really bad ones. Of course, no names. The only reason I haven’t used it is when the artist insists that they don’t want it which is rare.

I analyse the pre-recorded audition for signs of Antares Auto-tune pitch correction software and notice that a lot of the longer notes tend to fluctuate in pitch at the tail end of the note when she begins to run out of breath as it’s more difficult to stay in tune, Auto-tune will not let that happen so I’m pretty convinced that no Antares Auto-tune was used at all. I told Mr Payne this and that given the poor quality of compressed audio on Youtube clips, I couldn’t hear any evidence of Melodyne either. I’ve investigated a bit now and find there have been some stories flying around the net that this performance has been tampered with, but how and who could tell, I don’t know. If it had, then it must have been Melodyne and whoever was doing the tampering didn’t do a good job because the tuning was all over the place!

Apparently Mike Stock was also asked by the Sunday Mirror at the same time as me to analyse the two videos too. I bought the Sunday Mirror and was sheepishly reading through it on my way to my gig at Carnival and didn’t spot any Susan Boyle Autotune scandals. I see now that THIS is Mr Payne’s Sunday story so Mike Stock must have came back with the same conclusion as me.

George pointed out, it’s tough that Antares are bragging about all the publicity and fuss this story is generating but the more sophisticated Melodyne can’t because it’s more difficult to spot so no one is talking about it so the general public have never heard of it!

Apple Logic Pro with Avid Pro Tools HD DAW Systems:

I heard here that Apple (Logic) are to stop support for Avid’s Digidesign products (Pro Tools). This is a massive kick in the teeth for Avid who I here are struggling a bit at the moment. Neither rumor surprises me; I cashed in my (digital signal processing) chips a long time ago when Apple brought out the G5. The chips I cashed in were a Digidesign HD 3 (before excel) and a 192 interface. I could see the end for the need of processing power on PCI cards.I thought I should get as much money for my Digidesign Pro Tools HD system as I could, I already liked the sound of Apogee interfaces so I bought a Rosetta 800 and made do with a G5 dual 1.8. It was a bit sluggish but I knew bigger beasts were ‘in the post’. And in the post they were beyond my wildest dreams because I had no idea about the intel chips they were going to load them up with. I have to say also that I thought the Rosetta sounded much better than my 192 I had. Engineers often criticise Apogee stuff saying it sounds a bit sheeny. If they do then I like sheeny!

I hated the way Digidesign’s upgrade systems worked. I spent a fortune upgrading my Mix system to HD and it seemed only months later HD Accel came out. It’s part of the reason I sold my HD system when I did; I wasn’t about to fork out all that money AGAIN! Here is a recent letter they sent out to their customers telling them that they are building a website and dropping the Digidesign name if you’re interested. All those brand names were a bit confusing; Pro Tools made by Digidesign and Digidesign is owned by Avid. I don’t think many users even knew about Avid.

I do feel sorry for all those Logic users now lumbered with a HD rigs but soon will be unable to upgrade Logic. I don’t know why Apple are withdrawing support, I know that Avid and Apple have never been the best of friends but this really feels like kicking them when they are down. I wonder how much my Logic using pals will be able to get for their HD rigs now. I’ve been native for a few years now, I’m running 2 x 2.8 quad intel xeon, a load of ram and I can’t even get the beast to break into a sweat. I use an Apogee Ensemble interface now. I swapped my Rosetta 800 for the Ensemble because I wanted the lightpipe i/o when I ran Gigastudio. The stereo sp/diff i/o still comes in handy.

I can see the Mac Pro doesn’t break into a sweat because I use islayer’s iStat: http://www.islayer.com/ It’s a neat app which lets me know what’s going on in my mac; from the temperature of my processors and disk drives to how much processing power I am using and from which processors, handy when you want to see how your individual plugins use your processors. There’s even a handy ethernet bandwidth counter! All the stats appear at the top of the screen and look great; there are drop down menus of everything for more detailed statistics.

My advise to any Logic users with a Pro Tools rig is to come and do a Pro Tools courses with George or get those cards and interfaces on eBay NOW! Apple Logic Pro with Avid Pro Tools HD Systems

Dave Garnish runs a music production school specialising in sound engineering courses and mixing courses 

Article URL: Avid and Logic

Logic Pro training: Zoom tool and using loops with regions:

I made a video at my studio about zooming for Logic Pro Training.  I don’t know how I managed to talk about zooming for over 6 1/2 minutes but I love it. The first 4 minutes can get a bit tedious if you’re familiar with all the weird and wonderful ways you can zoom in and out in Logic 9 but I have to say that the way I zoom with the zoom tool assigned to the right mouse button is very quick and I haven’t seen anyone else zoom this way before I’ve showed them. And once they get used to it, they don’t go back to their old way. There is another way of zooming in Logic 9 similar to the way you can zoom in Ableton Live 8 but I was unaware of this when I made the video. My way is still quicker so there’s not much point talking about it here.

If you zip forward to 4 minutes and play from there, I touch on how I use loops and why I don’t use the loop tool and also on my preferred way of using the zoom tool these days. I’ve never seen anyone use loops and stop them with blank regions nor have I ever seen anyone set up the right mouse button to use as the zoom tool before either so it’s well worth watching, and I can’t see how anyone would go back after getting used to doing it my way. I really don’t know why anyone would use the loop tool and it’s starting to show that it’s not people who make music who beta-test Logic these days.

Watch the video HERE

Ableton Live 8 music production and DJ courses coming soon!:

I’ve been making some records with Toby Tobias recently which seem be be getting picked up by labels before we’ve even had a chance to mix! I know I can’t complain but he does have this habit of playing very rough demos to labels, then we’re up against it to finish the master because everyone is excited and people want to put the record out. It does say a lot for the A&R guys these days when they can hear the potential from such a rough demo. We are going to be called Badonday, our first tune is called Albondigas and will be out on Flashback after we have mixed the dub and it has been cut!

Toby is THE Ableton man and although I have used Ableton to warp mark mutitrack drums in my time (and very nice it is too), I’ve not made any records using it alone. I have purchased a copy now with a view to rewire it into Logic and use it as a slave. Now it looks like Toby and I are going to be working together a lot, it makes sense to make a system which works for both of us. Next project is immensely exciting btw – same vibe, he’s played it to some labels before we even arranged it – I don’t even think Ableton Live was out of session mode! I previously dismissed Ableton as a bit of a toy, it didn’t sound great and was only good for warp marking drums and fiddling about with loops quickly. But seeing Toby Tobias on the mouse…. no, it’s great, version 8 sounds much better so now i’m going to include it here at Garnish School of Sound!

I’ve persuaded the Tobias to write up some courses with me and I’m aiming to have 6 workshops ready for mid July, and best of all, he has agreed to take at least the first set of workshops!! Amazing Ableton Live news from Garnish School of Sound!

George Shilling’s Pro Tools mixing and mastering key commands:

Just a quick note to let you know that you can see some of George’s favorite Pro Tools mixing and mastering key commands here in his blog. Also check out his chilled out band project ‘Sundae Club’ and the fab work he has done for the Haiti appeal!

I was always obsessed with my key commands in Logic, I used to swap key command ideas with my mates and I guess I ended up with a completely different set of key commands that the original Emagic ones. I actually learnt Logic in the early 90′s mainly by changing all the main key commands so they were the same as the old Cubase, which was sequencer of choice back in the day. Obviously when I move to another sequencer, none of the key commands are ‘right’ so I got round this by having my Logic preferences handy. Most recently by having a copy emailed to myself to my Hotmail account.

Last year when I started to teach, I found that my system of having my Logic preferences uploaded somewhere wasn’t convenient enough when I was having to constantly hop from one Logic workstation to another so I had to learn the standard ones all over again! Once exception though; I still HAVE to have my stop as ‘zero’ and play as ‘enter’ on the numeric keypad.

Logic pro 9 Environment Chord Memorizer: Musical tips:

One object I have in my music production environment click and ports layer is the Chord Memorizer, which can be a great music trick for DJ’s with limited musical skills.

The Chord Memorizer can be a useful music production music theory fix for DJ’s if you just want to quickly put some chords together which will have a good chance of going well with each other. I usually set it up so C plays chord one, D plays chord two, E plays chord three right up to B which will play chord seven. See this if you are unfamiliar with the chord number system. The Roman numerals are along the top.

In a nutshell, you can trigger all the chords in the key of C by using one finger on any white key on the keyboard from C to B which correspond to chord 1 (C) to Chord seven (B dim). All the chords in the same key have a great chance of sounding right with each other.

Chord Memorizer: Musical tips and tricks for DJs

So, first you crack open Chord Memorizer (windows – environment – click and ports – new – chord memorizer) Double click on it to bring up the double keyboard, Choose the note C on the upper keyboard. On the lower keyboard choose the triad of C major by selecting C, E and G like the pic on the left. Double click on the picture to make it bigger.

Next choose D on the upper keyboard and then select notes D, F and A. This will make a D minor triad. Next, choose E on the top and the notes E, G and B on the bottom, this makes an E minor triad. Notice that all the notes are white notes and equal distance in width apart. This applies right up to the B which will be a B dim so repeat until you get there. Now set the key limit on the left to the full range from C-2 to G8. This just tells the environment to use the entire keyboard.

Okay, now you can play all the chords in the key of C. If you up one in the transposition box (under the Key Limit), you’re now playing all the chords in the key of C sharp! If you go up ANOTHER 2 then you’re playing all the chords in the key of Eb. Eb is a hard key to play in – you’re a musical genius!

Here is a handy chart for commonly used chords in the relevant key. And here is a very useful tool you can use to see what notes go into chords and scales in all keys on the keyboard. I used both when I taught Song Writing and Music Theory.

Don’t forget to turn it off by bypassing it using a cable switcher when you have finished; you don’t want to be triggering a kick drum, open hat and snare when you’re trying to find a shaker in your drum kit! See here for more on that. Please don’t think now you know this trick, there’s no need to bother learning an instrument; Chord Memorizer is just a trick for people who quickly need to string a few chords together.

Before I get letters, I am aware that some Dj’s (like myself before I wound down) can play an instrument or two, but if I took a percentage of the DJ’s who have come to me for help, there’s no way we’d be reaching double figures. I would’ve thought we’d get similar stats for musicians who can DJ!

Logic Pro 9 training: Environment layer – Click and Ports:

Many people are a bit scared of Logic Pro 9′s environment and it even puts people off using Logic Pro as a DAW altogether. Logic Pro/Studio’s Environment is the foundation that Logic is built on. It’s been around since the birth of Logic in 1993 and remains pretty much the same to this day. Today we’re going to look at Logic Studio 9′s click and ports layer in the environment window which I think can be the most intimidating. Essentially it takes the midi notes you play on the keyboard and processes them using various objects depending on what you want to do. It does the same thing as the script editor in Native instruments’ Kontakt for all you Kontakt heads out there. Here is a pic of my click and ports page (click on it to make it bigger) It’s a bit more complicated than the Environment click and ports page out of the Logic Studio 9 box but still quite similar.

The strip on the far left is your controller keyboard. The pre process box tells you what you’re physically hitting on your keyboard. The post process box is a display of the notes after they have been processed. In this case, the keyboard is just a graphical display of the notes you’re playing on the keyboard but you can have it post processing or even have another post processing – you can set it up how you like. This is one of the reasons I encourage teaching on students’ personal workstations wherever possible on my music production courses

The Midi Click is your metronome so keep that lurking somewhere. The Octavizer just plays the octave up as well as the note you’re playing and comes set up in Logic Studio 9 (not Logic Pro 8) as standard. I deleted it because I know I’ll never use it nor is it interesting enough to include in any course. I have replaced it with the Delay line which is much more useful. The Chord Memorizer is used to trigger chords you set up to be triggered from one key on the keyboard. You can find and add objects by clicking the ‘new’ drop down menu.

You can access Logic’s environment from the ‘windows’ drop down or hit ‘Command 8′ Sometimes when you’re working on it, it slips behind your main window so I sometimes hit ‘alt’ then select it from the drop down and it becomes a floating window which won’t disappear. Try it.

You will see that they’re all cabled together. Nothing would work if there were no cables involved! All you do to cable things together is grap the ‘nipple’ usually to the right of the device, drag the cable to which ever device or object you choose. The key to my useful set up are the cable switchers, they are not the easiest to find so follow this path: new – fader – specials – cable switcher. I think you can guess the function of a cable switcher. To switch from one cable to the other, just click on the cable switcher itself. You will notice that I have a second cable switcher post the Chord Memorizer; one output feeds the sequencer directly and one makes a stop at the arpeggiator so all those lovely chords you are (not) playing get arpeggiated too. You’re a musical genius!

You can watch the video HERE

Apple’s Magic Mouse review using Logic Pro 9 in Snow Leopard:

Before the turn of this decade and I got my hands on a Magic Mouse, I used the Mighty Mouse and I got used to and enjoyed the scroll ball/sphere/nipple on the front. It was wonderful to be able to scroll up and down in the the arrangement and Piano Roll windows. About time too given how long scroll wheels had been available on other mice at the time. With the Mighty Mouse, not only could you scroll up and down but with the ball you could from side to side or even 360 degrees – again very useful in Logic’s windows when you want to quickly scroll from one section of a song to another without having to mess around zooming or fiddling with the bars at the bottom of the window. IT WAS JUST SUCH A SHAME THAT THE THING ONLY LASTED 6 MONTHS BEFORE THE BALL BROKE OR GOT CLOGGED UP AND YOU NEEDED TO BUY A NEW ONE OR FIGURE OUT A WAY OF GETTING THE GUNK OUT!!!

Apple haven’t exactly had a great record with mice. Remember that awful circular thing that came out with the first generation imacs? You never knew where you were about to track before you moved the mouse! Then the buttonless generation, buttonless because Steve Jobs doesn’t like the look of buttons! We coped at the time but now I can’t imagine life now without a right click!

Now we have the Magic Mouse. I had one popped into my Xmas stocking so I’ve had it a while now and between you and I, it was the toy I was most excited to get out and play with.

It doesn’t fill the hand like a Mighty Mouse; I know this is an issue for some but after a few hours, I got used to it. Tracking is supposed to be more accurate; it probably is but I never had a problem with the Mighty Mouse for tracking. Scrolling is much the same except you don’t have the much troubled physical ball anymore which can only be good. It’s nice the way you can pretty much scroll from anywhere in the top half of the area of the mouse as opposed to having to place your finger in exactly the same spot like before. Two finger swiping in Safari is great; no more tracking back up to that back button to view the main page after you read an article. Scrolling in Snow Leopard is joyful; I think they call it momentum. In a nutshell, the mouse knows how fast your finger moves and when you take it off, the page keeps scrolling and comes to a gradual stop depending on how fast your finger moved. SLICK! Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in Leopard unless I’ve missed something.

Just a quick note about MagicPrefs: it’s where you can set up all sorts of deeper functions for your Magic Mouse. For example, I set up two finger CLICK to get me straight to spaces, three finger TAP to expose all windows etc etc. Unfortunately when I’m zipping around my mac and my applications at the pace it do, I tend to put fingers on the mouse without noticing so I’m going into spaces, exposing desktop, viewing all app windows etc when I don’t want to and THAT is very annoying. Perhaps I could train myself to use the Magic Mouse more delicately. For now I have to turn all these funky functions off as it’s more important it works as a useful mouse than do tricks I can live without for now.

So the question is will the Magic Mouse make life easier for you in Logic Studio. And the answer is that it will do what the Mighty Mouse did and a load of extra funky stuff outside of Logic Studio but it should last a lot longer than 6 months!

Celemony Melodyne DNA pitch correction software:

Celemony Melodyne DNA pitch correction music studio software. But what’s it for? 10 years ago the standard way to correct pitch in vocals was Autotune. To correct bits manually, you’d have to use graphical mode. It was very fiddly, you’d have to load in a few seconds of vocal and then nip in to an inch square box and move the audio up or down to correct the pitch then bounce down. It didn’t sound great either. Then came Celemony’s Melodyne; the quality of its central pitch/time manipulation engine generated a real sense of excitement amongst Producers and Engineers on account of the new possibilities and user friendliness. It was not only easy to use but sounded pretty good too.

Then in 2009 came Melodyne DNA (Direct Note Access). It promised what some called impossible: the selective manipulation of individual notes within a polyphonic audio file? I was certainly skeptical, but seeing a few videos on youtube last year blew me away so I couldn’t wait to crack it open myself.

When I did, I loaded in a stereo mix of All Saints’ ‘Never Ever’. The reason I chose this record is because I knew the arrangement inside out and wanted to compare the intro with just the vocal and piano, and the middle of the song when all the ‘bells and whistles’ are in. Although the mix feels full throughout, there’re not too many musical elements going on at any one time.

I found it easy to nip in and change the individual notes in the piano chords throughout the song. Impressively, change the pitch of all the instruments without effecting anything else playing at the same point. Even instruments which were relatively close to each other in pitch. Unfortunately, I struggled to ‘lift’ the lead vocal in any part of the song. Even the intro where it’s only the LV (lead vocal) and piano in the mix. The method here would obviously be deleting everything you see which isn’t the LV part. It just didn’t sound good enough. Not even with a bit of ‘splosh’ (reverb and delay)

Q: What use is this groundbreaking software to me? A: Unfortunately, I can’t think of any.

• The old Melodyne is fine for me to tune monophonic vocal tracks. (To be honest, I don’t know if DNA sounds any better using it monophonically)
• Acapella’s ‘lifted’ off of mixes are unusable.
• I don’t need to nick other people’s musical elements or chords in the form of MIDI *
• I will never spend money on session musicians or orchestras before knowing 100% how the chords and melody are going to go.

So, it is undoubtedly the most incredible software I’ve every come across and great fun to play with. But, I can’t for the life of me think where it would be useful to me!

*I did this with my Songwriting students: if you like a chord progression and would like to know what the chords are, you figure out the root note for each chord and write it down. You can easily do with my ear but it may take some longer than others to do. In a nutshell, the note that sounds most like the chord should be the root note. Now figure out if it’s major or minor by listening to it and experimenting; now (specially if it’s jazzy or bluesy) roughly figure out any extensions. Write all this down and play through again and again tweaking until it sounds good. I think you’ll find that (particularly if you’re playing a guitar and recorded instrument is keyboard based) you are already playing different inversions before you teak some more to make those chords ‘your own’.

Music Production Tips and Tricks.

Novation Remote sl mk 2 automap software with logic pro 9:

Logic 9 courses. Another thing the chap from Focusrite told me is that now Novation Automap software works now with all Logic Pro 9 plug ins. Weird because it was only this year Novation told me that Logic Pro 9 plugsins were written in a completely different way than ALL 3rd party plug ins and Automap would never work!

Automap is very useful; if you have a Novation Remote or Remote SL, the software assigns all the parameters of the plugins to the midi controllers of the Novation Remote or Novation Remote SL so you don’t have to figure out or assign a midi controller for the filter cut off or what ever parameter of your plugin. The Automap software is programmed so it knows which parameter is on what midi controller and displays it on the display making things much easier. Newly supported software plugins include exs24, es1, es2, Sculpture, es m, evb3, evd6, efm1, es e, es p, evoc 20 ps, evp88, Ultrabeat and even the test oscillator!

I personally have a Remote 25 SL, and it is available to use and I can demonstrate Novations Automapping software in my Logic Pro Courses and Music production courses.

Ableton live 8 Rewired to Logic Pro 9:

I have just returned from an Ableton Live 8 demo for music production courses by a nice chap from Focusrite hooked up by Gavin at Kazbar systems.

I was very impressed by the way you now warp mark the audio transients as opposed to the grid now in Ableton Live 8. Also seeing it work with the Novation lauchpad was awesome. You can buy the Novation lauchpad for £150 and get a cut down version of Ableton thrown in. I will definitely be purchasing and call it a little Xmas present to myself!

I was thinking of rewiring it and using Logic as the master (because Logic will only be the master) doing all the clever audio stuff in Ableton then running it in the background or perhaps print it in Logic when I’m happy. I have an 8 core 2.8 mac pro so I shouldn’t think I’ll have too much trouble with grunt running both DAWs running. I also found out that you can use Live 8 as a master OR slave which would be handy if you wanted to run it as a master and use Reason 5 as a slave. The guy was saying that there is a track limitation in the cut down version and it doesn’t come with all the FX and synths the full version does. That suits me because I can’t see myself using it as my main DAW, and if one day I decided to switch from Logic (yeah right!), I can upgrade it. I’m working with a DJ pal called Toby Tobias and we’re working some some disco house productions. Latest one has just been signed to Flashback. He’s and Ableton Live head and after working with me, he is now learning Logic! I’m not sure if I’m blowing Logic’s trumpet here or mine. Maybe a bit of both but my statement is true! I was thinking of getting the Novation lauchpad because off the back of these productions, I am getting more DJing work again and I’d love to try that system out live. So I guess MY conclusion of Ableton Live 8 is that it’s very creative in session mode, very fast to manipulate audio and get things done quickly but still, a bit of a toy and will no way replace Logic Pro 9. Also, I’m still not convinced the sound is up to scratch. What the hell, toys are fun right? And with Logic Pro 9 still being the meat and potatoes of my system, I get the best of both worlds! I did ask him if I could run Logic Pro 9, Ableton Live 8 AND Reason 5 together but he didn’t know. May download the demo of Live and see. There are some nifty things I like in Reason 5 and it’d be interesting to see.

Last week I went to Putney to see a chap who is fairly new to music production. He needed someone to go to him and set his workstation up, as he had just bought a system but didn’t know how to put it together. Of course it would have been boring for him to come to me for a crash course only to get home and not be able to practice what he had learnt! There’s always a music production tutor floating around in the area so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like some one-2-one help.

It was a bit of a shame because he had bought a load of stuff from a branch of a large chain of pro audio suppliers. I would have advised him to buy different equipment and certainly not from this chain. I didn’t rub it in though as I didn’t want to upset him, and what he had was workable, but he could have bought better stuff for his money. I’ve been using Gavin at Kazbar for more years now than I care to remember. I’ll give you an idea of how long. People were not really using email much back then and I was working at Universal publishing as their engineer before they signed me. Universal needed their studio kitted out, well, I insisted they needed a lot more gear than they had at the time! I sent one of these instant email thingys round to around a dozen companies and Gav was one of the only people who came back to me on email! Since then, I have used him and his excellent tech support. You can call him and he knows what he is talking about and doesn’t favor any companies or products because he has a warehouse full of something he needs to get shot of. Another thing is that he’s his own boss and the only sales person so you know that a year down the line, you email or call the same person, you get the same person.

You can get him on gavin@kazbarsystemsinc.com and here’s his webiste.

Enough of my Gav ad; I will let him know he owes me a beer!