Our cutting edge Logic Training in London not only shows you how to use Logic, but you also how to make a record in your style from a selection of instructors who have been there and done exactly that at the highest level, including Larry Holcome who not only is the production brains behind Rebel Sonix, but is an Apple Logic certified trainer. 

In our Logic training courses we take you from the basics; what a DAW is and how it works, MIDI, workflow, plugins, using Channel Strips efficiently and Apple Loops; how to use them, when and when not to use them! By week two, you’ll be making your own unique sounds using subtractive synthesis in Logic’s ES1 and ES2. Sampling is week 3 which covers everything from mapping, tuning and the new funky way you can chop up loops in Logic 9. See our logic course page for more info.

Week 4 is all about audio and sound engineering techniques. Tom Belton usually takes over at this point of the course because of his engineering background and musical genre diversity. You will learn how to use Logic to record vocals, guitars and most regular instruments, how to compile takes effectively and learn all about microphones, the different types, polar patterns and recording techniques.

The Environment is covered in week 4 along with using the hyper editor, environment objects like chord memoriser, the arpeggiator and delay line. Lots of people are put off by the environment, but it’s not as hard as it looks!

In week 6 you’ll get an introduction to mixing covering automation in Logic, compression, EQ, convolution plugins, inserts, buses and grouping.

All in all, much more than a comprehensive course in Logic and introduction to music production, but don’t just talk our word for it, see what recent learners had to say about us HERE!

You can see our Logic training course here and all our other diploma music production courses here.

In this Ableton tutorial, Al Riley walks you through the side-chaining capabilities in this Ableton Live tutorial and bring a very basic idea to life in minutes. Most people have heard of side-chain compression. The gate and the auto filter are much less talked about devices when it comes to side-chaining. When you hear the beats and backing track before any side-chaned devices are added, you can tell for a dance music producer, Al makes a very good engineer bless him!! I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, I wouldn’t have done if I thought he would! He told us he made it sound a bit noddy on purpose to emphasise how effective side-chaining these devices this way is, but we don’t believe him! While i’m here, I may as well tell you that I did a side-chaining gating video in Logic if that’s something you’re interested in too.

Al is a globally recognised sound engineer best known for his work in Pro Tools, but don’t worry, he’s so respected in Ableton circles, Ableton quote him on their website along with a select few. Al takes care of the engineering side of our Ableton course, and we feel very lucky that he chose our school to do his lecturing work. 

Irfan Nathoo takes care of the more ‘electronic’ side of our Ableton course. Don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube channel to catch an Ableton tutorial from him soon, and many more from all of our team. 

Also, you can grab some free samples and all sorts of goodies on our Facebook page. You don’t have to ‘like’ us to get free stuff, but if you do, you’ll be in the loop for future giveaways.

In this Pro Tools tutorial, Al Riley shows us how to use Pro Tools’ Beat Detective to fix timing problems in multi-track recordings. This technique is used by engineers who have recorded drummers who’ve played to a click, but have wandered in and out of time. Al does the demonstration on a four bar section of drums to keep things simple for the purpose of this Pro Tools tutorial, but you can apply this principle to longer sections or even a whole song. 

Beat Detective has been around for many years now, Ableton’s version is Warpmarking and Logic now has Flextime. It’s interesting to see how over the years DAWs copy each others functions. I’m not sure if Ableton was first with Warpmarking or Pro Tools with Beat Detective, but when it was all new, most engineers wouldn’t have heard of Ableton, let along use it in sessions, so for a very long time, the only way to do anything like this is a professional studio environment was in Pro Tools. This is one of the reasons why Pro Tools has lasted so long as the engineers DAW of choice. 

Al is a globally recognised name in the pro audio world and is predominately known for his engineering work in Pro Tools. You can read his interview in MusicTech. We are very lucky that he chose us to work as an instructor.

This Pro Tools tutorial was brought to you by Garnish School of Sound where you can learn how to use Pro Tools, Logic and Ableton. There’re also courses in Songwriting, Mixing & Mastering and Electronic Music Production. Please see our courses page for more information.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube channel to be in the loop for future Pro Tools tutorials.  Also, you can grab some free samples and all sorts of goodies on our Facebook page. You don’t have to ‘like’ us to get free stuff, but if you do, you’ll be in the loop for future giveaways.

Logic and Mixing learner Nick Burns (Captain Mermaid) tells us how he put the recording techniques he learnt on the Logic course and even the Mixing course in to practice when he recorded and mixed this collaboration with singer Rebekah Anne Steele.

“I used two SE small capsule condenser microphones  on the guitar and arranged them in a XY pair to get a nice stereo image. I did record a DI signal, but didn’t end up using it in the mix in the end. If you want to know how not to record a guitar, see the video!

I got Rebekah to sing the vocal into her wardrobe so the clothes would absorb most of the sound waves after they pass the microphone diaphram. Most of the rest of the waves would get diffused by the hangers and pole. I chose her wardrobe as she has much more clothes in it than I do in mine! If it was mine, the sound waves would just bounce around the empty wardrobe which would be worse than bouncing around a room! I used an Audio Technica AT4050 large diaphragm condenser mic which I borrowed form a friend with a pop shield. I popped in the high pass filter as I live near a train line so wanted to cut out any rumbles at source. After the mic, I used a Focusrite ISA 430 with a little compression to get as hot level as possible without squashing it too much, she’s quite sibilant, so I used the built in de-esser subtly just to avoid getting any nasty sibilant spikes but still retaining a good level. 

Nick On The Mixing Course

Strangely, apart form the microphone techniques which I learnt on the Logic course, I learnt all the ‘recording’ techniques on the mixing course. The singing into the wardrobe bit on week one in acoustics, and controlling the dynamics on week 2. Next up for me is Ableton, and I want to do an EMP course after that. I wanted to be the first to do every course, but now with the relatively new Songwriting and Pro Tools courses, that may not happen. The Songwriting course looks tempting, but i’m not sure I want to learn Pro Tools just yet. I think I have enough to be getting on with right now!”

Stefan Olsdal from Placebo did our Logic & EMP course at the end of 2011. He’s not only given us permission to tell you, but has kindly agreed to let us interview him about his time here at GSS too…

1) DG: So we know you as a rock star but EMP stands for Electronic Music Production. It’s easy to understand why you did a Logic course, but not so much the EMP course given the genre you’re known for.

SO: Placebo has fused rock with electronica over the years by using some of the producers we have in the past such as Jim Abbiss and Timo Maas. I’ve also dabbled in electronic music with a side project and have also done a bit of DJing. The reason I took the course is because I wanted to get more in-depth with different types of synthesis, electronic sound design and even beat programming.

2) DG: Do you think that anything you’ve learnt on the course will have an influence on any future Placebo material?

SO: Everything you know about producing music, whether it’s playing the guitar, singing or tweaking a synth, it’s all about forming your own voice, and the tips and tricks i’ve learnt on the course will certainly contribute to that. I’ve been working on music the whole time on the courses here and at home, putting the tricks and methods i’ve learnt into practice. I’ve found that the way I approach things now is different to how I did before. I find now I work in a kind of optimised way, not only saving so much time when I work on music by getting what I want quickly, I now just know what to do to improve a song with production. There’s so much more scope now, so many more options than I had before I did the EMP course in particular.

3) DG: When I first put the courses together, I did wonder if doing two at the same time would be too much for people, but since then, i’ve been assessing people (including yourself) on the phone and together we’ve decided. How did you find doing your Logic and EMP course at the same time?

SO: We’re due in the studio in the New Year, and I had this time in London so I thought i’d cram it in and get as much as I could done while I had this window. I thought the pacing was fine for me and didn’t struggle. In fact, I thought the courses complemented each other really well and at times slightly overlapped which was good for me personally as some things we skimmed through in the EMP course, we went in-depth in the Logic course and vice-versa, so I have no regrets doing both at the same time at all.

4) DG: Do you have any plans for any more courses with us or anyone else?

SO: I’m thinking of doing the mixing course with you guys. I’m building a home studio, and as time goes on, I like the idea of not being on the road quite as much and being a little more home based. Doing your courses is really part of the long term plan and the mixing course for me is the logical progression. It all depends really on when I can physically be around long enough to attend!

5) DG: What do you think about our new premises at the Arthaus?

SO: It’s great; not just the clean modern set-up with the facilities you have here, but you’re in Hackney so you’re in a great part of London!

6) DG: Finally, if you could change anything about your experience with us, what would it be?

SO: At one point on the Logic course I was wondering if we were going to cover grouping. On the last day I had totally forgotten about it, but right at the end Irfan covered it. So no, I wouldn’t change anything. The EMP was a completely new world to me and I loved it. So again, no, I wouldn’t change anything on that course either.

My name is Larry and I am a lecturer on the Logic course and the Electronic Music Production courses where we teach you how to make Dubstep at Garnish School of Sound. I am also the music man behind London AV bass merchants Rebel Sonix.

I’m going to give you a brief description of how to make Dubstep, touching on key elements on a genre which has become the biggest musical phenomenon of recent years. In this article, I am going to outline some basic techniques for Dubstep music production. This is a simple guideline so you must inject your own originality!! So generally I like to start off with a vibe or an idea. It might be a remix in which case the nature of the track will already be decided to a great extent. Otherwise I always like to start with an inspiration – a sample or a vocal; something to ensure my track has an identity. Once I have decided the direction I am going to take, the next step for me is the beats. Dubstep generally clocks in at 140bpm although depending on the style it can range from about 125-140. I always start with the kick and snare and to program these I use Logic’s Ultrabeat in sequencer mode. I find this a fun and intuitive way of programming beats. I use Ultrabeat in full view mode and i will program a kick snare pattern first. You can of course replace Ultrabeat for whetever is your preferred beat maker in your DAW. With regards to the sounds, generally we are looking to get phat, punchy sounds in the first place. I tend to replace the built in Ultrabeat sounds with sounds taken from my own sample library that I have accumulated over the years. DO NOT use average sounds and think that you can EQ and compress them to sound amazing. Other producers are going to be using amazing sound and gently tweaking them to sound more amazing. Which do you think will sound better?? I can’t stress this enough – a track is like a house, build it on solid foundations!! For the kick if you have a subby bass part which in Dubstep, invariably you will, then the kick will be sitting just above the sub in the frequency range. Generally 100Hz is a good ballpark figure for where your Kick should be sitting. You must get into the habit of using the analysers that should come with your DAW. Trust your ears but also trust the analysers!! They can also help compensate for an imperfect monitoring environment. As for the snare, you should be looking at around 250Hz to give it that punch on a club sound system. Sometimes giving a little EQ boost in these areas can be an acceptable way of ensuring they hit the right areas! Programing wise Dubstep is half time so generally the snare will be hitting on the third beat of the bar. You can be more flexible with the kicks, percussion and hats.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube channel to catch an more tutorials from all of our team. Also, you can grab some free samples and all sorts of goodies on our Facebook page. You don’t have to ‘like’ us to get free stuff, but if you do, you’ll be in the loop for future giveaways.

Our songwriting classes take place at Alex Von Soos’ studio in Fulham, West London as it’s more geared towards songwriting lessons than our usual setup of individual workstations.

Writing a song is one of the most rewarding things a musician can do; it makes you feel happy, confident, attractive and can earn you a pile of cash too! Writing a song can be for simple personal pleasure, for a gig you are playing later that night, for an advert you’ve been asked to contribute to, a theme tune for a film, even a ringtone for a mobile phone. The opportunities are endless.

In most acts, you tend to find that there is one or maybe two songwriters, sometimes more. These people often write their song alone, and bring it along to the band in a rehearsal room or a studio for the rest of the guys to play. The songwriter does not necessarily tell the bass player what to play, or the drummer what to drum, but if the melody, chords and lyric were written by her, then generally we consider it to be her song.

Alternatively, some acts write together. This tends to occur in rehearsals, where the band jam together, eventually leading to a completed song. In these cases, each player has usually not only composed what she plays on her own instrument, but has made a contribution to the writing of the song as a whole.

And then, there are hit writers who are not members of any band. These people write songs for other artists to perform. Burt Bacharach (Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick etc), Cathy Dennis (Kylie Minogue, Rachel Stevens etc) are good examples of these kinds of writers.

Whatever king of hit writer you intend to be, there are some important principles that apply to you and your forthcoming career. These form the basis of the way the music industry works with compositions.

You have a great song, it’s a potential number one, and by some unlikely twist of fate it’s about to be recorded and released by the biggest star of the year. Everyone is patting you on the back and reminding you how much they’ve helped you through the years. Then it dawns on you: this is too good to be true, surely I have to give away loads of my future earnings to someone, this is the music industry after all?

Well, on most occasions you won’t have share the money you earn with the artist at all, certainly, there is no legal imperative for you to do that. This is one of the beauties of writing for a third party. They need your hit song far more than you need that particular artist to record your song. You can always take it along to someone else; you’re in the driving seat so to speak. Congratulations!

There is one major thing to be aware of though: Quite often, the artist you are writing for will object to a line you have written and change it for the recording specifically so they can take a chunk of your earnings (and credit). There are countless examples of this through the decades, there is very little we can do about it. We used to call this ‘add a word, get a third’. Much more on the business side of things in your songwriting lessons with Alex. Check out our songwriting classes in full, and let us know if you’d like to book. Don’t forget, they’re based in Alex’s West London studio!

Here’s a little taster video:

Our Pro Tools training is second to none in London. We deliver our classes in our fantastic new building, the Arthaus in Hackney, London. On our course, not only will you learn how to use Pro Tools, but you’ll learn from an industry name recognised globally, giving you a unique insight in to how Pro Tools is used in the real world on recording and mix sessions in the top studios. From the basics including setup, computers, programming, MIDI, the interface including mix and arrange windows, workflow and file management and more fun stuff like the Structure sampler and Boom drum machine. Also covered is audio and how to create a beat. All this and it’s not even day two yet!

Week two pro tools training focuses more on making your own unique sounds starting with the basics; oscillators, filters and envelopes for tone generation and shaping using the vacuum monophonic tube synthesiser. It’s here we look at using controller keyboards and you learn to assign contrillers to your virtual instruments. Automation is covered quite early in this course compared to other DAW courses.

Week three is all about Pro Tools’ forte – sound engineering and recording techniques. You won’t just learn how to use Pro Tools for recording, you’ll learn microphone techniques for recording vocals, guitar and other common instruments. You’ll how to use auxs, busses, FX like reverb and delay, EQ, and basic dynamic controllers, audio editing, playlists, track grouping and track display modes.

Week four you’ll get deep into advanced editing and production tricks; how to ‘comp’ vocals and using elastic audio and beat detective to make the rhythmic members of your band sound even tighter.

Week five is all about samples and loops; mapping and tuning drums, chopping up loops, overlaying samples, filtering and time stretching.

Week six is mix time. This is where Pro Tools really sticks out of the crowd. Pro Tools is the engineers DAW of choice mainly because it’s so powerful with audio.

So why pay more for less? For the best Pro Tools training in London, GSS is the place!

Anyone who does an audio mixing course should experience life ‘out of the box’. Not only is it fun to have a play on a load of real analogue kit, we believe that your mixes in the box will benefit from this experience.

Victor balancing up a backing track on the Neve. It is a different art and most of my engineer friends hate using mice, but I have to say, i’m so used to them now and I really don’t mind.

Nick plays a mix Gabriel brought in through the NS10s, the Genelec 1030s, and finally the Quested big boys which need scaffolding to hold in place. But if you don’t have lots of monitoring options in your studio, fear not, checking your mixes in different environments has the same effect, although it may not be as convenient. My favourite is the car test.

If you understand signal flow in the analogue domain, your mixes will benefit; not only will you appreciate all the plug-ins you have access to, the infinite (processor allowing) instances you have of each plug-in, you will think differently when using plug-ins and your mixes will improve as a result of this. It’s more than just understanding how busses and auxs work.

Here’s a close up of the patch bay and those lovely Avid Pro Tools interfaces!

Nick is about to scratch his shoulder. Gabriel likes this.

Mixing the old with the new; multitrack in Pro Tools up the Neve. We don’t use tape in these sessions but there’s an old 2″ and 1/2″ we have a look at.

 Live room

Finally Gabriel marks the the individual channels on the Neve with the parts before mixing. Are there any other uses for masking tape?!

Focal invited me to Dean Street Studios for a Focal SM9 and Twin Studio Monitor Speaker Demo ages ago, but I just haven’t had time to write about them until now. 

When I walked into the room, the monitors were set up along with some NS10s like we have here for our mixing course. They looked massive with what I thought was an extra driver in the top of the cabinet! More on that later.

Focal SM9 with the passive radiator in the top

The guys (Focal, Focal’s distributors and Gav at Kazbar Systems) had a selection of CDs and asked me to take my pick. I chose James Blake’s album so I could check out how man these monitors are first with that ridiculous bottom end on that record. We flicked through his album until we found the tune, and on it went. All I can confirm from this test is that the sub bass in that record is just too low. I couldn’t really hear anything but the cones were violently flapping about along with the curious cone in the top. It was this point that I asked what the hell it was. It’s called a passive radiator, and all it is really is a speaker cone without the metal bits and magnet. It concave when idol and flaps in and out to low frequency. As for the rest of the design, the inside isn’t designed like a resonating cabinet, nor it it full up with absorbing material. It’s just a sealed box with crossovers, air and amps. You could say it’s neither ported or infinite baffle design. I do wonder what effect the negative sound waves that come out of the back on the speaker bouncing around a cabinet full of amps and crossovers arranged in no particular way. Also, the frequency range is 30Hz right up to 40kHz. 40 kHz!! When we’re born, we’d be lucky to hear 20kHz, and by the time you get to my age around 18kHz is impressive. Lord knows how I can still hear up to 19kHz with the hammering my ears have had over the years! Anyway, what’s the point in going up to 40kHz? At over £4k, they’re not cheap. Are they that expensive because they go up to frequencies twice what a human can hear? I’ll be interested to see how many they sell.

They sounded good when they played something a bit more normal from what I remember. They had some Focal Twins on the floor of the control room so I asked them to set them up too so I could A/B the pair. I do remember the twin sounding not too hifi which is what I get form my Genelec 1031s which I liked. 

Focal Twin and SM9 side by side

One thing about the Focal SM9s that I liked is that they work in two modes; i’ll call it ‘full fat’ mode which is 3-way and ‘diet’ mode which is 2-way. In a nutshell, ‘full fat’ mode is all the speakers on full steam ahead, and ‘diet’ is a neat cut down version where not only the main driver is turned off, the crossover is altered so it’s practically like having an extra pair of near field monitors. I’m a big fan of that, the only problem with it is that you have to change the monitors individually with a fiddly switch on the side of each cabinet. I know if I had that, I would use it half as much as I would if I could control it easily from my listening position with an ‘alt’ button in the middle of an SSL for example.

To summarise, they sounded okay but they didn’t blow me away, it was difficult to tell and I didn’t instantly try and justify £4k in my head for some studio monitor speakers that I don’t really need. I’m a bit scared of the never-seen-before design with that weird passive radiator because I don’t understand fully how it works as I do infinite baffle and ported designs. There’re faults or at least draw-backs with both the infinite baffle and the ported designs, but I do worry about what happens to those negative sound waves in this design. I guess the jury’s still out. I need to get Gav to get me a pair to borrow for a while and will report back. Watch this space…

Congratulations Adam Heaps who won Resident Advisor’s Ableton course competition with us. He’s nearing the end of it now, so we thought it’d be a good time to catch up with him…

Congratulations on winning the Ableton course. How did you find out about it?

“I often check the competition bit of RA and it was there. I wasn’t aware of Garnish School of Sound until I saw the competition (which I was lucky enough to win). I was really pleased to win the main prize, and I have had some decent luck on their competitions over the years, as it is a site I am constantly on.”

What made you enter? Are you a DJ, producer looking to learn Ableton, audio enthusiast…

“None of the above! Ableton is software i’ve been aware of, having known friends use it and reading various articles about similar products, but I hadn’t ever considered learning any music production software before. I have a passion for music, that’s about it really! Most of the other students on my course are from a DJ or songwriting background, but everyone’s on the same level, everyone is loving learning and gets on really well.

I am always looking to find new skills and techniques, both for learning and appreciating music too. I didn’t expect to win the competition though, but I am very glad I did as I always seem to be either practicing or recording on Ableton now!”

Resident Advisor is the no 1 dance music magazine. How do you think they have got it so right for so long?

“I have been using RA for some years (I believe they are having their 10^th anniversary), and I am on the site a lot. The event listings section was initially which brought me to it, and you can see how much it has grown too as I have found venues in quite a few different countries – the furthest was a club on a beach in Ecuador, watching Damien Lazarus. Shame to be back in London really…

The forum is always strong with the technical help, as are the news and reviews. There is a lot of information on there, especially as some articles seem to go back many years, making it easy to search specific topics. Also, when I come across a new DJ who impresses me, I read up about them on the site without fail.”

About the course itself, how did you find it?

“As previously mentioned, I was fortunate enough to win the competition through the RA website. Having now attended Garnish School, I can say that I have learned so much in such a short space of time, and I am constantly trying to build on and at the same time putting my ideas to the test.

Garnish has a relaxed environment, which definitely helped, as there are plenty of questions to be asked! I appreciated the fact that there are tutors from various different backgrounds (including producers, sound engineers, and instructors who are certified by Ableton too). This gave a broader approach to what Ableton is capable of as well as knowing there is more than one way to achieve what you want. The warehouse adds to the vibe of the whole experience too because it’s not just a school and you feel that; there’s always a record being mixed or produced somewhere in one of the studios. There’s a buzz about the place, everyone’s really friendly and you never know who you may bump in to.”

So is there a next chapter on your music production journey?

“There is now! I’ll continue making new tracks from scratch, as well as recording mixes too. There always seems to be more to learn on the Ableton software, so will definitely be using it as much as possible and trying out new ideas.

As I have been building up my library of sounds and beats, and having played with some friends, I want to hopefully look in to live performance too.”

Our unique Hit Songwriting course is proving to be a bit of a hit course, so we thought we’d share with you 10 free songwriting tips from our very own Alex Von Soos. There are many ways to write a song; some prefer starting from scratch with an instrument and vocal, some like to have a ‘vibey’ backing track almost finished before finalising the melody. The reason for this is that it’s easier to get inspiration from a backing track with plenty of ‘bells and whistles’ on it than the bare bones of a track or just the chords. The drawback is that you can spend ages working on a backing track but not know what the melody is going to do, so you may have to rewrite the backing track again after you write the melody. That’s a real pain!

With a UK No. 1 and 5 million record sales to his name, Alex Von Soos is our songwriting instructor here on the Hit Songwriting Course

Here are his top 10 hit songwriting tips:

1. The backing track, no matter how innovative, sounds like it belongs to a/the genre
2. The chorus/main hook has a feeling of inevitability
3. The overall feel of the track is not too pretty/cheesy/trite
4. All the melody parts are fun to sing and have the right weight
5. The backing track feels vibey even without the singing and the sounds are tastefully chosen
6. The lyrics are original and contain some memorable lines and no cringeworthy lines
7. There is contrast between the sections and build within them
8. The total combination of melody, lyrics and track paints a coherent emotional picture that is neither too bright nor too dark
9. The chords by themselves convey a strong feeling of tension and release
10. The song contains many highlights like hooks and riffs

We’re lucky to have Mark Jenkins as one of our instructors on our Electronic Music Production Course. Not only is he a synthesiser expert, he’s authored many books on them including Analogue Synthesisers. He’s recently been commissioned to write a book on tablet music production, a topic he covered at our fantastic ‘Binge Thinking’ event last week. Mark delivers week six of the EMP course, and covers synthesisers ‘out of the box’ when our learners get to play on our vast collection of toys in our Analogue Suite, modular synthesis on our modular synthesiser, and the last part of the day is on tablet music production. Tablets are used more and more in music production and we are there already on our EMP course. They started out life used mostly as controllers, but as Mark said at our event, things change so fast, something very exciting comes out every six weeks so no week six of our EMP  course is the same!

What other music production school in the world do you have an analogue suite like ours, a modular synth and already content on tablet music production?

Given that Mark Jenkins is one of the leading experts in the world on synthesisers, he was asked to do an item on national television. Check out ‘The Gadget Show’ on channel 5 on Friday 9th September 2011 at around 8pm.

Have you ever wondered how to write a song with good lyrics and a good melody? Are you a budding songwriter? Have you wondered whether you should write the lyrics or music first? Writing a song is easy but writing a great song isn’t. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the most successful songwriters in the world including Cathy Dennis, Wayne Hector, Alex Von Soos and (as an engineer) Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this article I am going to tell you about my experiences writing songs during my time signed to Universal Music as a songwriter. No two songs are written exactly the same way but most of the time they are written in a similar way. We now have a hit songwriting course at GSS which is designed to show you how hit songs are really written, from basic music theory to melody and lyric writing, idea generation and quality control, all delivered by a Number 1 hit songwriter with records sales topping 5 million. At the end of the course, you even get to co-write a song which will be pitched to major labels and publishers around the world.

In pop music, most of the time a song is written with two writers – a backing track writer who would normally start with the chords, put in a bass and build the track up around that. The other writer is a top-line writer. Their job is to take care of the melody and lyrics. A lot of the time the track writer would cross over into top line territory and contribute lyrical and melodic ideas and the top line writer would sometimes have a say on how the chords went. It’s not often the top line writer would worry about the reverb on the snare drum or how fast the leslie is spinning! I was predominately a backing track writer, the person who wrote all the music and programmed the beats. I did often cross over into top line territory as I progressed and got more confident. I’ve delivered songwriting courses at degree level but don’t think it’s my forte really. I’d love to be a brilliant songwriter but i’m better at other things i’m not all that bothered about. The feeling of finishing a song that you believe to be brilliant is just so much better than smashing it behind the decks at a top London club or hearing a song you’ve mixed or recorded on the radio. One issue that probably held me back is that whenever I try and sing anything, it sounds more like a fire in a pet shop than anything anyone would want to listen to. It was always a bit of a struggle trying to sing a backing vocal part down the talkback mic to the artist who was in the vocal booth. I was better off using my guitar to get across when I was hearing in my head! I certainly don’t think i’m qualified to deliver the course at GSS, so we have Alex Von Soos on board who wrote All Saints’ ‘Black Coffee’ amongst others contributing to his amazing 5 million record sales.

A lot of the time the track writer would write a backing track or instrumental, sometimes it may have been already written like a big dance record which has already done well on the club circuit. The record that springs to mind now is Spiller – Groovejet ‘If this Ain’t Love’. The backing track did the rounds in the clubs and was very popular. A talented publishing A&R woman Ruth Rothwell at Universal Publishing asked Rob Davis to write a top-line to this backing track. He did and they ended up using the chorus. ”Spiller was a backing track that was sent to me, and I wrote a whole top line to it, and they ended up using my chorus,” explains Rob. “I think Sophie (Ellis-Bextor) wrote the verses herself.” I’d imagine the splits were 33%, 33% and 33%. I don;t know this for sure and am not going to find out because it’s not important for this article. It’s pretty industry standard that the backing track writer gets 50% and whoever writes the top-line gets the other 50%. When i’ve written with an artist, usually it’ll be with a top-line writer so we’d just split the publishing three ways – track (me) – 33.3%, top-line – 33.3% and artist – 33.3%. So if i’ve written the track and the top-line writer has written the… top-line, what is left for the artist to write? Well, not much! Cue the phrase – ‘Add a word, get a third’! That happened a lot, it never bothered me because a third of something is much better than half of nothing!

So, on with how to write a song. Most of the time, once we have some nice chords together, the top-line writer tries out some melodies and sings along some ‘dummy’ lyrics until we have something. If this jamming process has gone brilliantly, you have your chorus chords, melody and lyrics nailed, but that is seldom the case. You may have your chords and something ‘hooky’ in the melody and the top-line writer is wondering why she’s singing ‘can’t sit down’! So, you have a great chorus melody, leave the chords alone now in the chorus and stick with the melody as it’s good and the most important element in the song. Now it time to have a think about the lyrical hook. What’s the story? We’ll have known who we’re writing for days before we got together. We’ll kind of subconsciously analyse the metering of the melody, sussing out the syllables and for how long they need to be, until out of the blue, out pops the lyrical hook! Great title, it fits perfectly with the metering of the melody and it’s perfect for the artist! The whole process so far can take anything from a few minutes to a few hours. The difference between B-side and first single is not dictated by how long it took to come up with the idea. Occasionally, you may have the title of the song before you have your melody. I always found it extremely difficult to fit a melody to lyrics. Elton John works like this. Maybe he finds it difficult coming up with melodies if he doesn’t have lyrics to inspire him. I’d like to ask him that but unfortunately I only ever worked with him as an assistant engineer at Air, many years before the thought of writing a song entered my head.

The most important thing is that we have our chorus, everything else now is just filling in the gaps, accommodating, justifying and making sense of the chorus. The next job is verse one. The chords are usually similar, if not identical to the chorus but there’s no need to agonise over the melody over the top even half as much as the chorus. In fact, you don’t want the verse melody to be anywhere near as hooky in a similar way as the chorus or you’ll be in danger of taking away the impact of the chorus. It can be hooky as long as it’s doing something different – if the chorus is long and floaty (a few long lush sustained notes) then perhaps the verse should be choppier (short staccato notes but more of them) to give the two sections some light and shade. Once you have your verse melody, you should be singing away some dummy lyrics. If you’re lucky, some of the dummy lyrics you’ve been singing will actually end up on the record. The lyrics in the first verse should be setting up the story for the whole song, they should be the first stepping stones leading the way to the chorus. Again, most find it easier to fit the words to the melody than the other way round.

Next up, the bridge (or pre chorus if you’re in America). In pop music a big musical change is usually in order. Usually, you’d want to alter chords as well as the melody. It’s tough to stick with the same chords and really change the song just with the melody. Perhaps start to think about backing vocal parts (or background vocals if you’re in America) to beef things up a bit, but not too much as again, you don’t want to take anything away from the chorus which is about to hit in a matter of seconds! How to get into the chorus, how to set it up so the chorus hits the listener on the head when it arrives, make sure the change on the downbeat of the chorus works with the last chord of the bridge. All things to consider when you’re writing your bridge!

Now you have your V1, B1 and C1. The audience now know what the the song is about and it’s now time to write the second verse. Melodically, it’s the same as V1 so we now just have to write the lyrics. Ideally you’d want a progression of the storyline but sometimes the lyrics aren’t suited to writing in a linear fashion and you just expand on the general vibe of what you’ve already written. Next up, the second bridge (B2) the melody has already been written, it may be nice to twist it up a bit, but if we feel the melody worked particularly well first time round, then it’s probably silly to try and fix something that’s not broken. There should be something different lyrically, it all depends on the story of course. Sometimes there’s an element of contradiction or twist in the second bridge. 

Now the meat and potatoes of the song is written, let’s have a tinker with the arrangement, let’s see what we can do for the intro and outro, let’s tinker around, listen again and again patting ourselves on the back and procrastinate for as long as possible, but in the back of our minds we know that sooner rather than later we’ll need to write another section to set up the final chorus and provide relief from what’s gone on before: the middle 8 (or bridge in America). We need to figure out a musical change out of the chorus, a whole new melody and lyrics. We’ve said everything but now we need to think of something else to say. Who invented middle eights for crying out loud? Is there a rapper in the band? Does anyone fancy doing a talky bit? That’s always a good get out! All joking aside, they can really lift a song if the writer does a good job. Also, it’s worth knowing that middle eights don’t have to be eight bars long and they usually appear towards the end of the song and not the middle! 

Verse (USA = Verse)

Bridge (USA = Pre-chorus)

Chorus (USA = Chorus)

Middle 8 (USA = Bridge)

I think the Americans got the terminology right on this occasion, their way makes much more sense.

What I have written is a rough guide on the formula on how to write a song, although there are only 12 notes, no two songs are the same and if all songs were similar, we’d live in a boring world! I’d say 95% of the writers i’ve worked with write songs this way.

If you ‘d like to know more, we have a six week hit songwriting course and we’re honoured to have No. 1 hit song writer Alex Von Soos at the helm!

If your song ticks all of the above boxes, you will have written a tune that stands out from the crowd. But songwriting is one of the most demanding areas in the music business, and you will find that, as simple as these rules sound, they are almost impossible to master without the right training and, most importantly, hands-on guidance from an experienced professional writer who will pinpoint all the small flaws in your first drafts and show you how to get to the next level! Alex also owns the song critiquing website SongProofing, where, he will analyse your song(s) and send you back a list of immensely useful tips to improve the particular song in question and your songwriting in general.

Larry Holcombe is our teaches mixing and mastering and week three of the EDM course where he shows he learners how to make Dubstep in Massive. Massive is the first tool that springs to mind of you want to start learning how to make Dubstep. As you progress, you will want to start using other toys too including Logic’s ES2 and maybe some outboard gear like a Nord lead 2. Larry shows you how to make a Dubstep bassline in Massive and then the exact same patch in Logic’s ES2 demonstrating that you don’t need Massive.

Larry Holcombe

This is the new Rebel Sonix video mixtape spring 2011. The mix was put together using serato video and the vj software resolume. The boys use an edirol v4 mixer to crossfade between 2 video sources in the same way that a DJ mixes between 2 audio signals using a Dj mixer. Larry Holcombe uses serato video to mix in rebel sonix videos and scratch in video samples. Phil rebel sonix uses resolume to vj live on tracks that the boys don’t have videos for. They even go as far as to make custom videos for other people’s tracks in their mix or produce new remixes of their videos! If you would like to learn how to make Dubstep, give us a shout and we’ll try and engineer it so you get Larry!  http://www.vimeo.com/24094102

Electronic Dance Music | How to Make Electronic Dance Music | Act Natural… by Steve Powell

I personally feel that you can break electronic dance music (EDM) down into three things when learning how to make dance music; structure, sound and soul. The soul you put in is a mixture of so many things like groove, expression, the spirit of a track, it’s emotion, subtle timings and a million more extras. At the end of the day however, soul is a fairly unexplainable term. It’s just there, you feel it, love it and that’s about… it. Musical structure (as an analytical term) is a massive subject and is itself a part of the soul of music whether it’s the way that a breakdown happens in a house track or the tiny fill a drummer plays just to vary the beat. Sometimes the devil is in the details, sometimes it’s in the master plan, and hopefully both. For this article however I’m going to talk about sound, particularly in electronic dance music 

Electronic dance music (EDM), against what some people think about it’s ‘mechanical soullnessness’ really did grow out of spirit and love for the music. Detroit techno, Chicago house, early rave and hip-hop were all born, not out of machines, but people wanting to express themselves and make music. The fact the styles developed as they did was far more out of the faults, limits and idiosyncrasies of electronic equipment than anything else, but develop they did. However, digital sound has always been a little lacking (far more lacking at the beginning), compared to analogue, and analogue even loses out in terms of detail and richness to real world acoustic sound (any analogue-heads out there shouting and waving sticks can argue with me at a later date). However, synths produce sounds which cannot be made in the acoustic world which is their real strength; they are sonically unique. This exploration of other-worldly digital sound does have a price tag though; it can’t quite stand up against acoustic sound in terms of richness, depth or quality. If you have ever played with or done live sound engineering with a combination of acoustic and digital sound sources you will know how difficult it can be to keep the dynamics of the digital sound in line with the acoustic instruments. Simply enough, acoustic instruments will always have more punch and clarity than the sound produced by a computer. So if you can’t beat them, join them. Here’s a few ideas of how we can take this and use it to our advantage.

If you were to make electronic dance music (EDM) such as house out of natural sounds like thumps, squeaks and crashed from the real world, it would be pretty quickly put under the heading of ‘avant-garde’ house more than anything else. That’s not to say house never has acoustic sounds in it, they frequently do, especially the piano (or an emulated version of) but in general they are made out of synthesised sounds and electronic drum kits. Why? Because that’s part of the brand, and you can only push the sounds so far before it becomes re-branded. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be done, I’m all for more experimental styles, but it might not be what you want if you’re trying to make a dance-floor house record. The trick here is to take what you want from acoustic sounds to support other bits of your track. An example for you…

One of my favourite types of kick drum is that hollow, knocking type that seems almost dead but still has richness. The material most often associated with that timbre is wood, so simply enough we try to get that sonic imprint into the track by layering it into the drum. For this exercise you need a microphone, a microphone cable and an interface. I’m guessing you already have an interface which hopefully has a mic input. To begin you really don’t need an expensive microphone, try the classic Shure SM58 to start with. It’s solid, doesn’t require phantom power, has decent sound and survives pretty much anything from being dropped in a puddle to being whirled around some young punk vocalists head. Not that I suggest you attempt these things. Find something wooden and heavy such as a table top, bed post or door. Experiment by whacking it with a number of different objects and recording the results (basic recording guides can be found anywhere on the net). Then, in your audio editor or DAW, try putting the recordings together with kickdrum samples, making sure the hit point exactly coincides (zoom down to sample level for this). Try compression, EQ and level changes to change the way the two blend together. Tuning one of the samples to balance better with the other can really help, just use whatever pitch changing plug-in you have to hand (remember that the more extreme the tune, the more it degrades audio quality so be slight if possible). Also, change the envelope with which each sample plays so that you have the initial hit of the wood with the tail of the kick drum. Trying all of these techniques can help you come up with a unique sound which can help compliment or oppose other elements in the track, or simply give a different edge to it. In this case it can give a tribal feel to some of the drums, very effective with toms, congas, bongos and shakers.

Another line of attach from the natural world can come in the line of more sustained sounds. Instruments such as the double bass can do wonders for improving the richness and solidness of bass-lines, but having a double bass to hand is not always possible, so a good sample pack can help out with that one. There are however plenty of sounds to record free and conveniently. Try dragging something across a surface: pencil across paper, a jam jar lid down wallpaper or the squeak of a fingertip across wet glass. Record it, drag it into the DAW and mess with it. There’s a huge world of sounds to be used, looped, layered, reversed, distorted or FX’ed to death, and whilst they may not immediately appear to be completely typical to the genre that you make, real gems can be found which make your music stand out from the rest and be truly unique. One other interesting tip is convolution. Convolution reverbs such as space designer in Logic uses recordings of real world spaces to create virtual ambiences for sounds to be artificially ‘played’ in. These recordings known as ‘impulse responses’, are recordings of starting guns or popped balloons in good or interesting sounding spaces. However, there is nothing to stop you dropping in any sample you like as an impulse response to impart some sonic character.

The moral of the story is to try new things. Making interesting sounds can be as easy as recording yourself scream and messing around with it in your computer, and it can be easier to do than learning how to use a new synth.

Dave Garnish runs the boutique music production school Garnish School of Sound, with sound engineering courses for all levels

Article URL: Electronic Dance Music

Dance Music Production – Creative vs. Technical by Steve Powell

What does it take to make a record in terms of equipment? A four track? A Mac Pro? An SSL4000E? What people use and how they use is of course crucial to the quality and type of dance music production that’s made. The equipment heavily dictates many of the attributes of the music that’s created, probably far more than many people realise. It was commented by one well known electronic music producer that “I realised that I was getting bored with a lot of the music I was hearing; everything seemed to sound the same structurally. After a while I realised it was because the first, and often the following sections of a piece of music were all the size of the default Pro-tools window.” Case solved it seems. Similar occurrences are frequent such as the abundance of house tracks that many labels receive all being at the default Logic 120 beats-per-minute tempo. This is even before having to get started on the continuous use of presets that come with synthesisers, and how often samples from well known packs are woven into received tracks.

To make music that is different and unique, especially with computers, you often have to be more technically active and aware. A few examples of this are learning more in-depth synthesiser techniques, becoming more familiar with some of the more involved parameters and idiosyncrasies within your DAW and developing your knowledge of how to apply more advanced music theory to productions. Truth be told there are some people out there who can take thirty year old sounds and make new and interesting creations; there is a whole chip-tune community out there that can attest to that. However, writing music with sine-waves and bursts of white noise may not be your thing, and if you composed a draft for a romantic score with the love child of Super Mario Bros and Venetian Snares you’re unlikely to get the get the contract. So… to change your music to be more interesting, to sound better and maybe to give you the edge over the person vying with you for that contract, record label or high profile DJ slot, it may be time to delve a little deeper into some technicalities.

However, there is another consideration that presses upon a musicians, as well as everyone else’s mind; time. Presuming you are a beginning or amateur musician, or even a more established one, it’s pretty likely that you still have a job involving non-musical activities for your main source of income. Therefore, your time is of utmost importance, and to get the best out of it you can, a good balance between learning and doing can be very helpful. I would personally argue that doing is more important than learning, because you automatically learn as you do, but you don’t necessarily do whilst you learn. It’s also important to make the distinction between doing something that you have learnt to do, such as writing a track with arpeggiated notes after having learnt how to use an arpeggiator, and learning something new in a fashion that optimises the speed at which you learn and therefore puts that practice into use. A well established example of this is learning scales on an instrument such as the guitar. Left to their own devices, many guitarists will learn over time what notes to play in a certain fashion at the time they feel best. If we had a look at a guitarist fifteen years after starting to play, chances are that we would find them playing the major and minor scale attuned into whatever genre they like to play. This way of working is of course a perfectly legitimate way to learn and comes very natural to some. Stevie Ray Vaughan famously never learned a scale in his life and was one of the greatest players that has ever been, but that doesn’t mean his way is the best way for every instrumentalist. Say we took the guitarist in my example at the beginning of his playing life and taught them the major and minor scales, modes, pentatonics and more exotic scales. Learning these along with techniques and exercises such as speed picking, string skipping, playing to a metronome and sweep picking has been proven to be the most effective way of learning the skills to play as an all-round guitarist. Result? A better player, quicker. Before anyone objects to this by saying the music should come from the heart, I agree; completely and absolutely. But it’s better to be a playing from the heart with great technique than playing from the heart with average technique.

Lets take this concept and apply it to a computer music example. We have someone who has been DJ’ing on decks for a few years. Having started with techno and house, they’ve veered slowly onto more experimental beats and Intelligent Dance Music (IDM), and after becoming interested in the prospect of using Ableton Live for Live DJ sets, decides to make the jump from vinyl to digital. Also, our budding laptop performer fancies making a few loops in Ableton to merge into the set along with tracks by other artists. Now, someone who is knowledgeable with computers should be able to install the software, launch a new project and know how to save and load with ease. Also, the concept of a digital channel strip, EQ and FX should come naturally to a DJ. Upon initiating their first project, our newbie delves into the program and works out after much clicking and frowning how to create a new clip, open an instrument, route some audio and midi, flip between and clip and arrangement view and draw some notes. This might well have taken quite some time without any help at all, even with Abletons on screen tips and help. The quicker solution would have been the quick-start guide or the in-program tutorials. However, these are basic concepts and have still taken some time to work out. Take warping or complex signal routing for example, how long would they take to work out with no guide at all? There’s a simple answer; spend some time learning and find the answers. You can pretty much guarantee that the most successful and knowledgeable musicians today are still learning, referring to the manual, watching tutorials, posting on forums and have a list of things they want to learn as long as their arm.

Having established that some learning time can be good for us all, I have a warning from the other side of the fence. It’s far too easy to get bogged down in the technicalities. It’s also easy to get so involved in learning something or doing something technical that you forgot or lose track of exactly what you are doing it for. I work with Max/MSP and love making my own instruments and tools for music, all of which has musical purpose; to make this sound, that sound, to be able to control this synth in a particular way or whatever I want to do. However, there have been times when I suddenly realise that I’ve been coding for days and not actually made one sound and that what I set out to achieve has become lost or blurred in the process. I’ve also known guitarists that have practised scales so much that they don’t write a song or learn a new lick in weeks, just like I’ve known Ableton DJ’s get so lost in making perfectly warped, catalogued and levelled libraries that they practically forget how to mix.

I hope I’ve given a heads up to a very simple but sometimes difficult to balance element of the musicians life. Whatever you want to achieve musically, knowing what to do when can be one of the most helpful insights of all, so have a think about whether you spend your time best to get to where you want. I suggest trying three things. One: Make sure you learn a little regularly and put it into practice. Two: Remember that it’s all about the music and never forget why you’re doing something technical. Three: Be aware that even though lessons, exercises and practising can be tedious, it is in fact being creative, simply because it’s part of the process that creates.

Dave Garnish runs the boutique music production school Garnish School of Sound, with sound engineering courses for all levels

Article URL: Dance Music Production

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.

Mixing Music with Creative FX | Mixing Desk

by Mr Steve Powell

The signal chain is something always at work whether you’re in the studio, playing around with beats on the computer at home or playing a synthesiser live at a gig. If you are purely a performer, your worry with the signal chain ends when your voice seeps melodically into the microphone, or perhaps at the point your electric guitar strings leave their mark in the magnetic field of the pickup. However, if you have anything to do with the recording or production of sound, the signal chain can mean an awful lot.

If you’re mixing music with creative FX on a mixing desk or in your DAW, it’s always good to know about how and why the electrical signals that represent your sound work the way they do around whatever equipment you use. Connectors, sampling rates, tubes, data formats, bit-rate, compressor circuits, noise ratios and many other considerations can be crucial in protecting the quality of the sound. Equally, in the case of analogue equipment especially they can subjectively improve the sound, adding richness, colour and depth. Equally again, especially easily in the digital domain, sound can be degraded, it’s quality to be lost forever. Forgot to change the sampling rate back up for that awesome guitar solo you just recorded? Unlucky… just changing the sampling rate of the recording won’t bring the quality back. Thankfully it’s not all doom and gloom because a) the guitarist just may pull an even better one out the bag, and b) if you make sure it’s all set right, digital audio can be pretty good. One of the best things about it is the ways in which you can route audio around your DAW, manipulating sound and creating new ones.

Having a different compressor for every track even in a reasonably modest (for modern times anyway!) sixteen track project is a fairly lofty dream for most of us in outboard terms. Add to that an EQ for each track, a pre-amp for each of the microphones recording a band, a smattering of FX units and whatever else and we’re far beyond the size of the space most of us have to work in, let alone the reach of our budget. Therefore, working ‘in the box’ is an attractive idea, not only for the money and space but for what it offers us musically. Taking Logic Pro as the environment to play around and experiment in, it’s easy to add an effect, move it, copy it, save the settings, put it on a bus, route to it from a bus, side-chain it with other audio and the list goes on. This gives the opportunity of being able to do pretty much what we want, how we want it, to the limits of our computer (which is by no means a small consideration).

So, for our first classic routing trick, we present… The vocal chop! Fantastic for building up to chorus with lead vocals, or for adding to backing vocals for adding rhythmic presence. To get this effect, place a noise gate on the vocal track, or create a gated copy of the vocal track just for the chopped vocals. Then route all the sound sources you wish to activate the gate (i.e. chop into the sound) to their own bus. On the gate plug-in, select that bus as the side-chain, press play and there you have chopped vocals. You can then set the envelope of the ‘chop’ with the gate, set how low the gate holds the volume with ‘reduction’, and set how sensitive to audio you want the gate with the ‘threshold’. If you want to set the gate to be triggered with something else apart from already existing audio, simply place any sample where you want on the timeline and route to the bus that sets off the gate. Samplers on midi tracks can also be used. Just make sure that if you don’t want the audio triggering the gate to be heard, simply change the bus to ‘pre-fader’, lower the volume slider and all will be well.

Whilst this example is making a very obvious addition to the arrangement of the track, signal routing is often used in far more subtle ways. Consider this: you want add delay and reverb to a guitar part. Which way round do you put them? If you were to place the delay first, you would get the sound of the original guitar part reverberated, plus the delays reverberated the same way. Around the other way and you get the reverberation of the guitar part being delayed rather than the other way round. This subtle difference may not be something that is immediately noticeable when buried in the mix, but it can make a big difference to how the guitar sits in the mix, or how it sounds when the solo is on. In a similar way, if an instrumental part has some of it’s low end EQ’d off and then sent to a reverb, the reverb may sound a little tinny or lacking in depth because it has no low end to fill it out. The solution: to send the signal to the reverb before the EQ cut. Just as easily the extra low end could be making a mix muddy with reverb, so sending it after the EQ cut would be better.

Going back to some more extreme signal routing, the sky is pretty much the limit to what you think up to do with all the tools at your disposal, but here are a few ideas. Create a separate track with a delay for drums and place a phasor or flanger after the delay for fuzzy delay taps. Try giving a sound a really long reverb tail then using the same gate triggering technique as mentioned earlier to chop into it. Don’t be scared of the Logic 9 environment, it’s much easier than it looks and has got some treasures packed away in there. The arpeggiator can be linked up to samplers for crazy melodic patterns and random sample triggering; great for IDM. Try copying a drum beat onto a different track, offsetting it by a beat or two and using it to side-chain the compressor on the bass track. With that you get an extra, wonky sounding rhythmical element to the bass track as it’s volume jumps about off-set to the beat. You can try pretty much anything you want; gates and compressors are great for creating rhythmic variation especially, reverbs and delays for texture.

In all these situations it’s always best to think about what’s happening to the sound all the way through the signal chain and try out different combinations in different orders to see what happens. Even more importantly though, don’t worry about which order to do them in or that some producer uses them in a certain order. Take inspiration from everywhere you can of course but let your ears and your intuition be your greatest guide.

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.

See all our music production courses which include all main DAW and some niche courses too.

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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A New Era for Sound Design and Music: Video Games. Article by Tim Vasilakis.

There’s a new market for music production emerging stronger than ever before with increasing sales volume by the year. That is the video games market. Having it’s origins in the early 1970’s, video games have changed and continue to change rapidly. The games industry is a place where creativity and technology merge with a constant drive to raise the bar higher. The expectations for audio have never been higher. The Game Audio Industry has emerged from the video game industry and is connected with the music industry in general.

The video games industry has always been successful, but especially the last decades it has become one of the most common choices of entertainment for kids and adults. Some people say that the games industry is the new Hollywood or even the New Jazz. An impressive 75% of household in the United Kingdom alone play computer games. As technology progresses video games become more and more like films, only better. And the reason for that is because they are interactive.

One of the most important elements in video games is audio. Game Audio refers to the sound effects, music and dialog that are placed in video games. Audio is a huge part of the story telling and fun factor for games. From the beginning it was an important, interactive element in the gameplay. At first it only gave the player the notion of success or loss.

Video games were always treated as an art form. As a matter of fact, many early companies would treat their team as artists highlighting their work by giving them proper credit on the end product. It was a rapidly growing industry.

Computer graphics and audio have developed hand in hand as multimedia and computers evolved. The more sophisticated games became, next generation audio was needed to enhance the development of the gaming experience. Music and sound design have come a long way, and have always been directly influenced by technology. The evolution of games and game audio has been so immense and within just 20 years it has hugely transformed from simple midi-sounding music themes, to complicated orchestral music scoring and futuristic sound design.

The art of video games has been evolving non-stop in the last three decades. It has absorbed into modern culture and it is the number one entertainment choice for the 21st century. There are numerous game development studios around the world. Countries like the US, UK, Germany and Japan account for the largest part of games production.

Early video games music was exclusively developed by the engineers themselves, and it was rather simple. As technology evolved, it had its impact on technology and animation,therefore high quality audio became a necessity. Back in the day, the only way to embed sound into a game was by directly programming it into the computer chips. Therefore early video games musicians were required to program those sound chips and transcribe their music into the hardware. Musicians always needed to stay on top of technological advances.

The rapid evolution of games and improved game consoles made it possible for music and sound in general to be created outside the game development and then later to be embedded into the game. Very much like the film and television industries. Furthermore and considering the interactive nature of a game it required musicians and sound designers to create content that would be completely influenced by the user’s actions. Therefore the sound continuously evolves or adapts as the game progresses, which directly enhances the interactivity of the game. This is what’s called interactive or adaptive sound.

The need for video game sound and music is on the rise. Game music is sold as soundtracks, and symphonic orchestras or live bands are part of the recording and performance. It is an exciting time to that people are open to all kinds of music.

In todays video game market there is a constant demand for high quality music, sound design and voice. From orchestral scores, to intense electronica, and absolutely everything in between. Musicians and sound designers work in house for developers and publishers. Most game companies have their own audio department, where the audio is actually produced. In other cases music production and most of the time dialog is outsourced to independent composers, sound designers or studios who provide their services on a project by project basis. No matter what platform or how advanced the game is there is always a need for composers, musicians, sound designers and audio engineers to create audio that drives the game and enhances the player experience.

Jeff Schmidt Sound Design/Music Demo [PROTOTYPE] from Jeff Schmidt on Vimeo.

The demand for high end music, sound design and voice for games is bound to increase. As mobile technology evolves rapidly and mobile gaming becomes more and more sophisticated, there is a whole new market opening up with tablets and smart phones, while console games are becoming more interactive than ever before, and in some cases the user is the controller. The new era of sound design, interactive audio and music is here to stay.

Check out the Sound Design and Music for Video Games course

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.

See all our music production courses where we have Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton and a lots of others.

Music production schools student from Copenhagen, Denmark:

A student who finished last week travelled all the way from Copenhagen in Denmark to do the mixing and mastering course. It’s always very pleasing when a student travels from far away to do a music production course. I was very happy to receive this card and some Danish marzipan in the post after the course.

EDM: Electronic Dance Music Production – Nu-Disco Filtering:

Here’s number four in my SOW series on a short Sound Design course I wrote back in the day.

The learners will:

Will identify with filtering, how the three basic filters work – LP, HP and bandpass and judge when it’d be a good idea to use them.

They will be able to identify the most common parameters on a filter, relate to analogue and digital.

They will understand how to create filtering using envelopes.

Explain filters and filtering. Explain Low Pass, High Pass, Band Step and Band Pass filters,2,4,6 pole and db/octave slopes, resonance, cutoff, drive, key. Low Cut is the same of High Pass, High Cut is the same as Low Pass.

Group listening of Low Pass filtering on Daft Punk records.

Group identification and discussion. Demonstrate by recreating the same low pass filtering on an old speeded up 70’s disco record. Filtering samples, Low pass disco house filtering.

Explain why different makes of filters sound different.

Discuss analogue and digital filter algorithms. Set group task of controlling filters using envelopes which we covered last time.

Demonstration on filters in Logic where the filtering can be seen and audio can be seen on the spectrum analyser in Logic’s channel EQ as well as heard. Learners to experiment with filters on their developing sound.

EDM – Electronic Dance Music Production Envelopes and ADSR:

This is the third one hour EMP – Electronic (Dance) Music Production Sound Design lesson in a scheme of work I wrote a long time ago on a teaching course with GSS in mind. This is about envelopes and the ADSR parameters

The learners will:

Define how envelopes work and the individual elements of the ADSR parameter. They will be able to practise different ways to apply envelopes and what they can apply envelopes to.

Explanation on envelopes and the individual elements to the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain and release) parameter. Uses for envelopes on both synthesised oscillators and audio samples.

Activities:

Group listen to some famous records with heavy use of envelopes used point out when they’re used then learners activity would be to  identify them themselves.

Demonstration by me on ADSR in Absynth where learners can hear and see in real time the effects of this parameter.

Learners activity now is to experiment with envelopes using ADSR on their mix of oscillators and individual waveforms using Absynth on their personal DAW

EDM: Electronic Dance Music Production – Oscillator Waveforms:

Here’s part two of my 6 one hour scheme of work I wrote for a teaching course I was on a while back. This is on the Oscillator and waveforms and I built on this when I wrote the Electronic music production course at GSS.

Objectives and outcomes: Understand the oscillator in detail, have a basic understanding of the principles. The learners will know about the four most common waveforms used in electronic and dance music production, how they differ in sound and what waveforms are most commonly used for certain elements of music. They will know how to layer more than one oscillator. Learners will have an understanding of how Absynth works and will at least be able to operate it as much as they’ll need to in this course.

Activities: Recap on previous session. Talk about the oscillator; what it does, where it fits in – ie its the foundation to the sound – you start with the oscillator and build from there. The principles of oscillation: the periodic fluctuation of two things based on changes of energy vibe. Listen to some well known records with oscillators easily audible. 4 most common waveforms; sine, sawtooth, triangle, square. I show learners how to operate Absynth in their preferred DAW and learners get experimenting auditioning different waveforms and hearing how they differ in sound. I show them how to draw their own waveform in Absynth combining a sine wave with a square wave. Learners experiment drawing waveforms and hearing how they sound. Learners layer up 2 or more oscillators using different waveforms as they are now beginning to build their unique own sound.

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!

Get your music heard by A and R at music management/label:

Antony Meola is the A&R manager at Upper 11, they are a top music management company and record label in London. He’s been in touch with me asking if I could recommend any hot up and coming producers at Garnish School of Sound to collaborate with existing producers on their roster working with artists both on and outside of their company. This could end up with you having a management deal with them so I have decided to offer this opportunity out to all of my supporters. I can’t forward off all emails myself and we can’t have email addresses published, so to get round this and spread the music career furthering love in as much of an automated way as possible, I have set up a Gmail email address which will automatically forward to Antony’s assistant Jess. Please send your  MP3′s, Myspace URL’s etc and contact details to garnish.aandr.forwarding@gmail.com

He is looking for all genres as long as it’s master quality sounding. I think that’s why he wants to hear my students He is looking out for remixers too which is what I think a lot of you dance music producers might be more interested in. I will keep an eye out and give feedback where I can – I’m quite looking forward to it actually!

I’m taking a bit of a risk posting this on all of my social media because I know not all of you have done a course at Garnish School of Sound so PLEASE only send in mixed material you think would pass on a UK club dance floor or on the radio. Antony is looking for good production, If he doesn’t get much of it, he probably wont ask me again or even ask me to stop the forwarding. I’m afraid I don’t have time to listen to all of your masterpieces and only send the quality stuff on to Jess so please take this into consideration, because if you don’t, it could spoil it for others. Of course I do appreciate that one persons idea of master quality is not everyone else’s but Jess knows what to listen out for. This is really an experiment which I hope goes well and i’ll know quickly if it isn’t. I just wanted to offer this opportunity to all of my supporters.

Good luck and please let me know how you get on – I’m really looking forward to hearing the success stories!

Electronic Music Production Sound Design Class in London #1:

I just thought i’d share with you a Sound Design Courses Scheme of Work I wrote a long time ago for a music production college in London. Each lesson is supposed to be one hour long. At Garnish School of Sound, we’d take a lot more time than just an hour – in some cases maybe a whole day for each of the one hour lessons I wrote! I think I was ambitious trying to cram this much in initially!

Lesson one:

Warm up/Ice breaker – Introduction to myself, students introduce themselves and the music they have been working on. Introduction to the course and what we will be learning, why it will benefit them by learning it. Run through some ground rules. I wet the learners’ appetite by introducing and demonstrating oscillators, envelopes, filters, LFO, FX and modulation used in some famous records; what they are for and why we use them. We dissect a multi-track and analyse all the elements focusing on the synthesis and not so much the samples or audio. We look at the history of Sound Design and old analogue synthesizers. We cover the differences between analogue VCA’s and digital ones and zeros. I then tell the learners that they will be making their own sounds using the main elements and I will be assessing them at the end of the course.

Look out for Lesson two coming soon and see if you can spot any similarities to our EDM at Garnish School of Sound

Recording vocals: DIY vocal booth and pop shield or pop filter:

This is about how I record vocals at home with a DIY vocal booth. We cover more on this on the Sound Engineering course.

I have a macbook pro plugged up to an apogee duet, pop shield or pop filter, some cables running from my dining room to my bedroom where I have made a DIY vocal booth out of my wardrobe and some dressing gowns.

You can see that  I have the mic pretty close to the clothes in the wardrobe to ensure as many as the sound waves from the voice are captured and absorbed before they get a chance to bounce back/reflect and end up back down the capsule of the mic again. The microphone’s polar pattern is set to cardioid so if anything did get a first reflection back out, the mic is optimised for one side. oooo, I love talking about microphones – I’ll try and do a whole post about them soon. I have two towel dressing gowns hanging up on each of the inside of the wardrobes. The idea is to create as much of a dead controllable environment as possible which then can be treated with exactly the amount and type of reverb you wish. There’s NOTHING worse than the sound of a vocal where someone’s just chucked a mic up in the middle of a room with stone walls – you get reflections bouncing all over the place. It’s a very thin horrible echoey sound which you can’t do anything about.

Pop shields are important and pretty cheap too – they capture the compressed air you give out when you make a ‘p’ or ‘b’ sound which ends up as really low frequency on your recording and can even cause digital glitching if it’s fierce enough. Once a hypnotist friend of mine popped over to record some vocals for an online hypnotising project she was involved with, I set the mic up as it but couldn’t find my pop shield, so I broke down a metal coat hanger, made it the shape of a pop shield (or pop filter) frame. The next thing was to find some tights to wrap around it, but I couldn’t find any of my girlfriend’s  so I dug a pair of her nickers out of the laundry basket! It did the trick with some gaffer tape and headphone wire.

Acoustic Treatment and Positioning of Studio Monitor Speakers:

Okay so now it’s time to choose and position your studio monitor speakers and just dip your toe into the wonderful world of studio acoustic treatment. More on this on the Mixing and Mastering course

Most people listen to music in their cars or on a cheap home stereo sometimes even in mono. If your mix doesn’t sound good on a pair of small speakers, there’s not much point. A pair of ridiculously expensive active monitors may sound amazing, but no one else has them, so your mix will be lost in translation. In an ideal world you would like a pair of studio monitor speakers which are easy on the ear and capture an element of the ‘biggies’ you’d fine in big commercial studios, so perhaps a ported design like the Genelec 1031‘s I use here and a sealed box type like Yamaha NS10′s for more of a ‘truer’ sound. Truer is all to do with their skewed frequency response, lack of low frequency resonances, low distortion and remarkably accurate transient response behaviour, all of which are qualities of infinite baffle designs using small, responsive drivers. Ported designs are popular in programming rooms and projects studios because you get more low frequency output which we all know and love – especially if we’re woking on dance records!

Genelec 8040a studio monitor speakers

If like me you don’t have space for two pairs of studio monitor speakers and like me given the choice of a ‘truer’ sealed box infinite baffle design or a more pleasing ported design, you’re going for the ported design you need to decide which ported studio monitor speakers you want. I’ve had my old Genelec 1031′s for donkeys years now and couldn’t recommend them enough! The new version of the old 10 series are the 80 series. I’ve heard that they aren’t as good as the older 10 series which personally makes me happy. If you have space, the 1032′s are a bigger and louder version of the 1031′s. In fact the whole Genelec 10 series always sounded the same right from the 1029′s right up to the 1032′s. Just the higher the number, the louder they got!

Focal SM-6. They do look nice don't they?!

I had a chat with Gav at Kazbar to get some info on popular choices these days and he recommended the Tannoy Reveal range starting at around £250 a pair if you’re on a budget which sounds really cheap to me, and Focal, a brand I hadn’t heard of before.

If you choose any of the common active brands on Gav’s or any good pro audio dealers website, I’m sure that you’ll get used to the curve, the room and as long as you check the mix in as many different environments as possible, I don’t see why you wouldn’t get the best results for your mixing ability.

I always recommend active speakers these days because the pain of even more studio cables, more hassle transporting, finding the right amp, messing about with crossovers if needed, and generally the greater margin for error is taken away by the guys in white coats at the testing centres of these popular brands. Let them do all the work so you can get on and enjoy mixing your record. Now there’s just the small matter of getting good at mixing!

Positioning:

I wouldn’t worry too much about exact angles when you decide where you are going to be sitting and where you are going to be placing your monitor speakers because you’re going to be moving around, which in itself is healthy for your mix because you’ll be getting a different perspective the more moving you do. For your main seating position, your head should be roughly one point of an equilateral triangle with each of the pair of your monitor speakers the other points of the triangle. So roughly an equal amount of distance between your head, each monitor speaker and distance between the speakers themselves.

Studio acoustic treatment:

As for studio acoustic treatment, and think next on the agenda is to write a whole piece on it, but very quickly, and you may need to do some Googling – you may want to start with some treatment behind your monitor speakers, consider a bass trap above your head and if you’re in a square room particularly, try some absorbing treatment to your left and right on the the wall.

Choosing Powered and Active Studio Monitor Speakers:

The positioning, orientation and mounting of studio monitors can have a huge influence on the final sound of a room and of course your mix. I wouldn’t go out and buy hi-fi speakers and a massive sub woofer if you have a room with parallel walls the size of a match box and don’t intend to apply much acoustic treatment.

We should be looking for a happy medium, neither too bright nor too much bass. If the aspirations we have for our work are that it should sound as good as it can on the widest range of systems out there; from top of the range hi-fi systems, portable mono radios to ipod players, then the perceived tonal balance of our monitors should be as close to the peoples average as possible. I encourage students to check their mixes in as many different environments as possible before putting their mix down; from studio monitors, built in computer speaker to simulate a poor quality mono radio (we use an Auratone speaker in professional studios for this), the car stereo (a favourite of mine), and even standing in a different room to hear only the reflections of your mix from a number of ‘natural’ diffusers and part absorbers which make up the hallway, curtains, plant in the corner and chest of draws under the stairs.

The most common nearfield monitoring systems found in professional studios are Yamaha NS10′s, usually used closed up and reasonably close to each other. The idea of having the same make of studio monitors in every studio you go to seems like a good one, you’d expect the sound to be the very similar from one studio to another, but because they’re passive (they need an external amp which can differ) the mix can sound completely different. On top this of course the differing sound of the rooms themselves. I personally wouldn’t fancy listening to NS10′s all day every day; high-mid frequencies feature prominently in their curve so they can be quite harsh on the ear, and there’s not much bottom end at all. I remember some engineers using them with a subwoofer, but not many. My NS10′s and amp are in my Dad’s garage – I just didn’t have the surface space for them in my programming suite right now but when I move, i’ll try and fit them in somewhere . The more ways I can check the mix as I go the better of course.

Left: Event Studio Precision 8. Right: Yamaha NS10m

This is the main reason why engineers like to use the same room for mixing time after time – they know the sound of the room, monitors and what’s powering the monitors, they are of course used to the console, outboard, assistants, staff, restaurant etc but in some cases they’re superstitious. Mark ‘Spike’ Stent was never comfortable venturing outside of the old Olympic Studio 3 after all the success he had in that mixing room. Once he outgrew the room, he had no choice but to move and he ended up buying the SSL G-series console he’d mixed so many hits on and plonking it in a bespoke control room he had built at Olympic just after my time there in the late 90′s. His near-fields of choice were the passive KRK 9000‘s. I wonder if they still are.

Then you have the main monitors or ‘biggies’ – some teachers and magazines say ‘far-fields’. One use for these monitors is when the A&R guy pops into the studio to tell us all that we need more midi or something (A&R people are much better these days, especially the ones who employ me now!). The biggies have plenty of bottom end, they are VERY flattering – you can fart down a mic and it’d sound amazing out of the biggies! The typical 90′s A&R guy will always leave the studio happy after hearing the a rough balance of the mix on the biggies before we’ve even turned on the (automation) computer. And of course after he’d played producer soloing the entire desk for no reason.

Genelec main monitors and some NS10's in Olympic Studio 1

But is this what we want all of the time when mixing a record? Of course not – we are not looking for the most pleasing experience for our ears, we want an accurate tool that will help us make the correct decisions, but at the same time not give us earache after an hour of monitoring. For this we want a pair of what I would call ‘alternative near-fields’. I say alternative nearfields because these monitors would not be the standard Yamaha NS10′s and be situated (usually) either side them. These are the monitors we should buy for our home studio set-up. So what are we looking for when we are choosing near-field monitors? And where do we put them?

To be continued…

Norman Jay MBE on GSS and Notting Hill Carnival after party:

Just thought I’d celebrate my latest release with Toby Tobias by dishing out the horn sample we used for the downbeat of the drop. We’re calling ourselves Badnonday and the track is called Albondigas. Too early to say how it’s doing but as I write this, it’s the first record on Phonica’s homepage which is a pretty good sign!

The horn is a long sample that rises towards the end and pans slightly from right to left. It really gives the drop an uplifting feel by bringing out the major chord but you can’t really hear it unless you’re listening out for it.

Download the horn sample HERE

Norman dropped in to the office to grab his copy early. There may have been a football match on too that day but we won’t talk about that! Since then he’s played it at Glastonbury and reports are that it went down a storm. I still haven’t heard it on a big system and I can’t wait to hear it at Good Times at the Notting Hill Carnival. I’m going on the Sunday and we’re both DJing at the Good Times after party at the William IV if anyone else is about. Hover your mouse over the image of us. We thought it was funny at the time!

Download Reaktor 5 synth ensembles from the EDM course free!

In my latest video on Reaktor 5 available in Native Instruments’ Komplete 6 bundle, my voice goes high pitched when I say ‘hi’ and then it settles down to what it’s normally like. I also say “crack it open” rather a lot for some reason.

Anyone can build an Ensemble (synth, FX unit, sequencer etc) in Reaktor just like anyone can build an application for an iPhone. The difference is that Native Instruments don’t police or make money out of the distribution like Apple do for their apps. You can imagine there are a hell of a lot out there. I have uploaded all my synths beginning with the letter S for you to download. I can’t give you my whole library because it’s over 9 gb. I’m giving you a selection of synths because they’re probably more useful to you than sequencers or samplers and I picked the letter S randomly.

When I mention Reaktor, my students on the Logic course at Garnish School of Sound tend to glaze over before I’ve said anything more – they associate it with geeks who want to spend all of their life building synths. It is for geeks who like building synths (I don’t think many make records) but who is going to be playing with these lovely creations after they have been built? The answer is you and me. So in this video, I scratch the surface of Reaktor 5, talk through some of the bizarre terminology, show you how to navigate to your sounds and FX (ensembles) and how to flick through the presets (or snapshots in Reaktor land)

Once I settle on a bass, I show you how easy it is to assign controllers in Reaktor, I send the signal to an aux and pop in a reverb on the insert demonstrating reaktor as an FX unit too. I do dip my toe into the building blocks but just show you how to access them. In my Dance Music Sound Design course, we cover Reaktor in depth and even get synth building!

Watch the video HERE

Download over 100 Reaktor synths HERE

Free Rodney Jerkins and Max Martin style drum samples!

Here at GSS, I’m giving away a full kit of drum sounds you may have heard on some Rodney Jerkins and Max Martin records. I also ‘made them my own’ by processing them through some Neve EQ and Urei compression and they really do cut through any mix beautifully and sound amazing as they are!

Get your free drum samples on our Facebook page HERE

Download free drum samples:

At Garnish School of Sound, we not only share the knowledge but we share the sample love too, and I decided some time ago that when we get to 173 Facebook fans, I will dish out some free drum samples. Samples I’ve been collecting and swapping with producers, engineers and programmers from all over the world for over 17 years now. My first of many giveaway free drum samples is a collection of unusual glitchy percussive sounds. I have made a video here so you can get a feel of them before you download or have to map them out if you’re not using an EXS 24 compatible sampler. There are a few little EQ tips and tricks for them too. They may not be everyone’s cup of tea but they are quite nice quirky sounds and you download the wav files here. I’d love to know what you think. Next free drum samples up are the horn samples we used in ‘Albondigas’ You can’t hear any horns on the track so I’ll tell you where we used them and why we used them and of course, they will be yours to download.

Visit our Facebook page to grab your goodies HERE

I have some amazing Kick, snare, hat and shaker I’m thinking about giving away too. I can’t say where I got them originally but I have ‘made them my own’ by processing them through Urei compression and Neve EQ. I’ll do a similar video when I have some time and will probably ask you to do me a little favor in return. Watch this space…

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.

Mixing vocals and Audio Compression in your home recording studio:

I’ve just got a youtube channel organised and my first video is all about mixing vocals using audio compression in your home recording studio.

I only scratch the surface and I think I need to work on my presenting skills but I played it to a musician friend of mine who said he learnt loads about mixing vocals using audio compression – that’s the important thing I guess. I keep saying that there’s no time and don’t explain why. There was not enough time because youtube only let you upload a maximum of 10 minutes at a time and not because my dinner was on and I didn’t want to ruin it!

In the video I go through the various hardware emulations, talk about the threshold, ratio, attack and release parameters and the gain reduction meter of Logic Studio 9′s built in compressor. How I get my Lead Vocal to sit in the mix. When not to use a spectrum analyser and use your ears!

As I mentioned in the video, we spend 4 hours on audio compression in our mixing and mastering course now here at Garnish School of Sound so if you get the feeling I’m going too fast in the video, I probably am and now you know why!

Watch the video HERE

Major, minor and extended chords on the keyboard and piano:

Music Theory Practice part 2 – Extended chords:

Just some more music theory rules. You will need to have some music theory knowledge or you could always book workshop 4 of my Logic 9 Music Production course. These notes are for recap purposes.

7 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED

9 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED and the 9th ADDED

11 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED, the 9th ADDED and the 11 ADDED

13 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED, the 9, 11 and 13 ADDED

Major 7 chords have the 7^th note in the scale ADDED

Major 9 chords have the 7^th note in the scale and 9^t note in the scale ^h ADDED

Major 11 chords have the 7^th, note in the scale 9^th note in the scale and 11^th note in the scale ADDED

Major 13 chords have the 7^th, note in the scale 9^th note in the scale,11^th, note in the scale and 13^th note in the scale ADDED

Suspended 2 = add the 2^nd note in the scale and suspend (lose) the 3^rd (mediant)

Suspended 4 = add the 4^th note in the scale and suspend (lose) the 3^rd (mediant)

Always count the root.

You can add notes to chords:

C add 11 you would add the 11^th NOTE only

C add 13 you would add the 13^th NOTE only.

Augmented is when you sharpen the 5^th (dominant)

Diminished is when you flatten the 3^rd (mediant) and the 5^th (dominant)

Root is always the tonic. If it’s the first note it is called the major root. We will mainly be working like this in this course. Don’t worry about “tonic”, “mediant” and “dominant” now. The chances are that you will never need to know and most hit song writers haven’t heard of them either! I just mentioned them in case some of you were interested and wanted to look them up one day.

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/piano/

A ‘+’ sign means sharpen and ‘-‘ means flatten the note.

Using the piano chord URL to see your major scales, work out the following chords:

Am, Gb7, E11, F sharp M-9, BbM9-5, CM maj7

To work out your major scales you can use the following rule starting on the root and working your way up in these steps:

Tone, Tone, Semitone, Tone, Tone, Tone, and semitone.

Now, work out the following chords WITHOUT using the piano chord URL.

Cm b9, Eb7, Fsharp M11, Db major7 add13, EbM7-13

Some of you may want to talk about voicing and inversions and we can later in the course. For now, here’s a brief summery below:

The terms “voicing” and “inversions” are often used interchangeably. However, the term inversions refers to the lowest note sounding in the chord (whether it’s the root or not). A chord with the root as the lowest note is said to be in root position; with the 3^rd as the lowest note it’s called first inversion; with the 5^th as the lowest note it’s called the second inversion; and with the 7^th as the lowest note it’s called the third inversion.

To play in a different key the easy way on the keyboard, you have a transpose button. So, to play your chord you’ve written in C and you want it to be played in D, you press your transpose button UP twice to go UP two semitones. To play your chord sequence you’ve written in C and you want it to be played in A flat, you press you transpose DOWN button four times so you go DOWN four semitones and so on.

Chords in  the key of:

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/chords/chordchart.htm

Relative minor is the minor chord which uses most of the same notes as the major scale. It has a lot in common with it’s relative. The same rule applies in reverse so C major is the relative major of the Am and Am is the relative minor of the C major. The reason it sounds ‘minor’ is because of the starting position (or root note) is different and is in a different place so in perspective it sounds ‘minor’

Look at the chords chorus of hotel California while I play it:

Chorus :

G                        D

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Em                   Bm7

Such a lovely place, such a lovely face

G                               D

Plenty of room at the Hotel California

Em                                      F#

Any time of year (any time of year) you can find it here

Listen to how the G and Em ‘relate’ to each other and the D and Bm7 ‘relate’ to each other too.

To work out a chord sequence by ear, I firstly figure out what the root note is for each chord and write it down. You can usually tell which note is the root note because the root note sounds the most like the whole chord! Then you have to figure out if it is a major or minor chord by listening and experimenting. Most of you should be able to do this with some practice and a bit of patience!

Music theory practice, chord progressions, keys and scales:

A music production college I worked at in London a while back asked me to teach a Music Theory and Music Composition course with chord progressions, keys & scales. I know my way around a fretboard of a guitar and used to play in jazz bands before I discovered turntables, so I thought I give it a whirl!

I looked on the internet for ages for good simple rules for chords, scales and extended chords but couldn’t find anything that I thought would be easy for the students to understand, so I wrote my own. These are recap notes written so students can refer to them after my lecture so you probably need to have some knowledge to begin with or you could always book workshop 4 of my Logic 9 Music Production course.

Working out basic chords quickly using semitones:

Major:             Root + 4 (3^rd) + 3 ( 5^th)

Minor:             Root + 3 (3^rd) + 4 (5^th)

Dim:                Root + 3 (3^rd) + 3 (5^th)

Augmented            Root + 4 (3^rd) + 4 (5^th)

To flatten a note you go down one semitone and to sharpen you go up a semitone.

Important:-

-                  Semitones are always the next key up or down on the keyboard; black notes AND white notes included. COUNT THEM ALL! We use semitones in the example above.

-                  Tones are two semitones (really?!) or two steps on the keys so a tone up from the note of C is D. A tone up from an E is an F sharp.

-                  When I say notes, I am referring to notes in a scale so you only count those. You will need to skip notes that are not in the scale. You will probably need to refer to a major scale chart or the first url in this work sheet to figure out which notes to count while working out more complex (extended) chords explained in the example below.

-                  Start off working out extended chords which are C. ie C11 or Cmaj7 etc.

A brief rule which you can use without the need for a chart is:

Root, +tone, +tone, +semitone, +tone, +tone, +tone (and +semitone to resolve back to the root up one octave)

For ‘Sound of Music’ fans, the notes should sound like:

Doh, ray, me, far, so, la, ti, doh!

Note that the “Doh” and the “doh” are the same note but one octave apart.

Okay, that’s enough of Music Theory for now. I will do extended chords next time…

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.

Standing waves and home studio acoustic treatment:

With technology advancements and computer processing power as it is now, the whole process of making hit records can be done in home studios, unless of course, you require a real orchestra!

People with home studios often do not realise just how important the acoustic environment is. We tend to get a lot more excited about spending a few hundred quid on a shiny new synth than home studio acoustically treating a rooms walls, ceilings and floors for standing waves. There is also the issue of aesthetics.

My lecture on acoustics can be six hours long and sometimes it can be difficult keeping some of the more musical and less scientific of students interested, specially when I start on standing waves. If we are in a room small enough (a control room or classroom and not lecture hall), a good way of vibing things up is to measure the distance between two parallel solid walls and try and generate a standing wave. You can determine what is the frequency of the standing wave for your room with this simple formula: V / 2d=f

• V = Velocity of sound (343m/sec)
• d = Room dimension in meters (length, width, or height)
• f = Frequency of the standing wave

Other standing waves occur at harmonics of the frequency that is 2, 3, and 4 times the fundamental but obviously, the higher the frequency, the less noticeable they become.

Why not try it yourself. Grab a tape measure and use the oscillator in your DAW. You need to have solid parallel walls in your space. Standing waves are the reason you never see parallel solid walls in a professionally treated recording studio control room.

Neil Johnston from Focusrite showed me the KRK ERGO. Wow, what a little box this is (if it does what they say it does of course). KRK make fantastic nearfield monitors and I would say are a company to be trusted. The first time I listened to a pair of KRK monitors was when I was assisting Mark ‘Spike’ Stent mixing Madonna at Olympic. The article the link goes to was written a few years after. Seems ancient now when he talks about Zip and Jaz drives! He had a pair of KRK 9000′s which sounded fabulous. Back then pretty much all monitors were passive and so were the 9000′s. It seemed crazy to me but a lot of freelance mixers karted around their monitors of choice from one studio to the next but just used whatever amp that was in the studio. Active monitors solved that one.

I’ve always had a problem with bass in my studio. I am lucky to have very high ceilings but unfortunately I think most of my bass gets lost up there in the chandelier. I do get a bit of bottom end but much further back from my seated position in front of the monitors. I have treated my room behind my monitors and I have some bookshelves at the back with act as nice diffusers for the mid frequencies. I could’ve of course have lost the chandelier and replaced it with a huge bass trap but I don’t think my girlfriend at the time would have been feelin’ that! And quite frankly, I like my chandelier, my high ceilings and the position of the studio so I make do for now by sticking my head in certain spots just before any waves get diffused by my bookshelves to check the bottom end. Also, I check in the car which is only on the driveway. It’s inconvenient, but I know the curves so well now in the space, I can make it work.

So maybe the KRK ERGO will be a much more convenient solution for me. It works like those Bose hifi systems by chucking out a load of test tones (all frequencies at the same time interestingly), monitoring them with a microphone and feeding back the data to the software (Mac AND PC btw). The box will then tweak your curve and theoretically, you will get a much ‘truer’ curve where you position the microphone. Gav said he would be able to get one for me to try. I will get back to you with my thoughts i’m sure.

If it is as good as they say, they will sell bucket loads. Given Bose have been doing something similar for the consumer market for years, I wonder why no one thought of doing this ages ago especially now with so many more records being made in home studios. I also wonder if the technology is any better than Bose’s or if there’s any patent. If no, I reckon KRK won’t be the only people making these boxes in 2010. I wonder if it can do anything about standing waves. I didn’t think at the time to ask Neil. Oh, that thought is what got me on standing waves here in the first place!

I do cover standing waves in my acoustics lectures at music production schools, colleges and universities and also in my music production courses in London.

Songwriting, Music Composition writing chords and bass lines:

Yesterday was my last day with my Song Writing and Music Composition students before leaving to set up my own music production school. In the course we covered chord sequences, melody, structure and rhythm, lyrics, arrangement, extended chords, bass lines, rhythmic parts, vocals and harmony.

It was a great course to teach but tricky in that they all didn’t want to learn all of the course. For example, most DJs wanted to learn about chord progressions and basic music theory for their productions, but were not interested in lyrics or any of the basic song writing production tips. Some of the out and out songwriters would’ve been happy to talk about lyrics for 12 weeks! I balanced it by splitting the group up and did as much one to one tuition as I could. I have broken up my own Song Writing and Music Composition Music Production Course into two shorter courses so no-one will feel like they are wasting time and money learning things which they feel is irrelevant to them.

Being a guitarist and not a keyboard player works out rather well, I am able to demonstrate the pros and cons playing in different keys with both instruments. With a guitar, it’s all about the shapes, and the same shapes up and down the fret board is the same song in a different key. With a keyboard, it’s all laid out in front of you from the left to the right. When I first took on a Songwriting and Music Composition course I was mildly concerned that piano not being my first instrument may be a hinderance, but in fact, it’s benefit!

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!

Garnish School of Sound press release

The new GARNISH SCHOOL OF SOUND where we teach you what you need to know in the way you learn best.

22/2/11 London

The new music production school, Garnish School of Sound is the only school with six week courses that teach you all you need to know to make great sounding tracks. We use cutting edge, real world equipment in a fantastic new facility in London’s home of music, Camden. With tutors whose clients read like a who’s who of music of the 21st century, this is surely the start of something special. Managing Director, Dave Garnish has nearly twenty years experience in the music industry working in all kinds of creative areas at the highest level, and has brought together a team which represents the best experience and knowledge for music production.

Dave Garnish says: “I don’t believe anyone can learn Ableton or Logic in a weekend, but neither do you have to commit years of your life to learn all you need to know. The feedback from people i’ve worked with over the years has been fantastic. The learners can also look forward to some pretty special masterclasses with some industry legends”.

“This is the school London has been waiting for” – Norman Jay MBE

“Your EDM course look awesome” – Anthony Middleton (Audiofly)

“Dave Garnish’s work and knowledge of music is outstanding” – Mike McCormack Dep. MD Universal Music

Their EDM (Electronic Dance Music Production) course caught our eye;  it includes an introduction to synthesis and track construction as well as sampling & beat making. You are shown how to create massive sounds using Massive and other synthesisers along with specialised synthesis techniques. You learn about groove and rhythm, arrangement, FX and lots more. Other courses feature everything from lyric writing to mixing & mastering. All this on a variety of platforms which all have their own beginners dedicated six week course.

The school offers a grand new central point for encouraging the talent of the world’s producers, musicians and DJ’s. With a philosophy that learning should be informative and exciting, the school offers an experience that leaves good memories, instills a whole new set of skills and gives a bucket load of inspiration. The courses reflect this ethos by providing a balance between how to use the tools of the trade, and how to put these tools into practice.

The class numbers are kept low making sure that during workshop time everyone gets plenty of one to one time from their industry active professional. Using an educational practice known as the Spacing Effect, students learn during the class, rest and recap over the next week and then come back for another session fresh. All courses are over six weeks and cost £399

Your can find out more by visiting their website at www.garnishschool.com or calling 020 7682 1082. Also, they have a great blog with some great articles and free tips, tricks and videos: www.musicproductioncourses.net