Special Offer on Cakewalk Rapture and DimensionPro

From the Cakewalk website:

—Owners of Apple's Logic Pro and Garageband, MOTU Digital Performer, Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo, Digidesign Pro Tools LE/HD, Ableton Live, Image Line's Fruity Loops, and Magix Samplitude Pro can purcahse Dimension Pro or Rapture for only $99 at select retailers through October 31st—

I own both of these synths and they are excellent. I get a lot more use out of Rapture (more synthy and wider programming capabilities) than I do DimensionPro (which is more of a ROMpler), but both sound amazing and at that price, there is no reason not to grab them.

Distorted Kick Drums With Punch

A very popular sound among the various harder-edged styles of electronic music is the distorted kick drum. The technique can add instant 'attitude' to just about any track, and pushed to extremes can make for unbelievably harsh, hard-hitting beats. The problem is, the more you distort something, the more the clipping reduces the dynamics of the sound. Why does this matter? Drum and percussion sounds in particular get their 'punch' from the attack transient at the beginning of the sound. When you reduce the dynamic level in a destructive way (like distortion), you reduce the transient, resulting in a sound with balls, but no punch. Getting around this is very easy, though. Here's how:

1. Render your kick drum track as audio and import it back into you Sequencer/Audio program of choice.
2. Create 2 new audio tracks and drag your rendered kick drum track to both of them, thus creating a second copy of the track.
3. On the first kick track, set up the compression as you would for an ordinary dance kick drum. Make any EQ adjustments, and if you feel the sound needs more low-end, this is the place to do it.
4. Now, on the second, copied track, EQ the low end out of the sound (say, cutting out everything below 200Hz) and send it through your distortion of choice. Concentrate here on getting the tone you want.
5. Now, press play on your sequencer and set the clean kick channel up to the level you want your kick drum to sit at.
6. Finally, slowly bring up the volume level of the distorted track so it sits just 'behind' the clean, punchy kick. You can fiddle with the levels to get cleaner or dirtier sounds.

So essentially, you have the spit and grit provided by the distortion, but without losing the punch of an undistorted kick, and more importantly, keeping your low-end cleaner. Below is a short example. The first bit is the regular drum track, the second is the distorted drum track by itself, and the final is the combination of the two, as described in the technique above. In my example, I've kept the distorted channel relatively tame, obviously raising the level of the distorted track makes for a harsher sound.

"Oxygene" Instruments Explained

Via parisvisite on YouTube - Pointed out to me by reader LineOfControl:



As sick as I get of the 5 million ill-advised 'covers' of Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene" on YouTube, it really was a seminal album in electronic music. Reader LineOfControl sent me this clip that I had never seen before where the man himself gives a tour of some of the vintage goodness he used on that track. I can't believe he performs live with that stuff... can you imagine what his insurance rates must be like?

That's a Stretch

Something unfortunate happened to sampling in recent years. Whereas sampling used to be about creating your own instruments by recording your own sounds and editing them into something interesting, in recent years it seems as if sampling has become more about pre-made drum loops and slick, pre-packaged sample libraries. This is a shame, because today's software samplers have more sound sculpting features than ever before, and the possibilities for sound manipulation are virtually limitless. Case in point: Kontakt's various sampler modes.

Of course the standard Sampler module is there, but there are also two interesting modes called Tone Machine and Time Machine. Tone machine can be used to turn sounds with no apparent tonality into melodic instruments. Time machine, on the other hand, can be used to stretch the sound out while maintaining its tonality. Simply by adjusting settings on the Speed knob, you can really change the character of a sound into something otherworldly. Even if your software sampler doesn't offer an option like this, you can use most audio editors to do time-stretching, even if it doesn't sound exactly the same. You'd be amazed at how weird even the most mundane sound source will sound if you stretch the bejeezus out of it

The point is, with a mic and whatever is laying around, you can (and should) build completely unique sounding instruments that will really stand out from the army of presets that plague a lot of modern electronic music. Hell, you can even use one of those presets as a starting point and mangle it up until it is no longer recognizable. Just give it a try, because most modern samplists are really missing out on some of the most fun you can have sampling!

Below is an example where I took a really bad sample of my guitar and molded it into something a bit more weird simply by using Time Machine and adding some compression, chorus, and reverb. The Original sample plays first, and the Time Machine version follows.

Book Recommendation: The Daily Adventures of Mixerman

A year or so ago, my friend Steve asked me if I had ever heard of this book. I hadn't, so he lent it to me and I tore through it in about two days. Granted, this book is an easy read, but it is also one of those books you'll find hard to put down. The book is basically a diary kept by a major label recording engineer as he works with a famous producer on the debut album of an unknown band that is supposed to be 'the next big thing'. All the names, including the author, are replaced with nicknames so as not to reveal their true identities, and this has lead to much speculation over the years as to who the characters are in real life. Anyway, although the topic may sound dry, Mixeman's snarky sense of humor and the drama that surrounds the band (their guitarist is a raging alcoholic... their drummer can't drum to save his life and has to be overdubbed when he is out of the studio...), make for a hilarious, and at times, a bit depressing look at the stuff that goes on behind the scenes in the music industry. You may notice that I haven't provided a link to buy a copy. That's because, for some reason, the book is no longer available to buy new. Used copies of this go anywhere from $450 - $1595 (don't believe me? Check Amazon), which is freaking ridiculous even for a book as good as this. Instead, I will refer you to the website for the book, which I believe actually features the entire diaries for you to read there if you have the patience to do that sort of thing on a computer. So CHECK IT OUT. This should be required reading at every audio engineering school.

Old Cevin Key Interview

via Bronzebed on YouTube. Includes a look inside the infamous Mushroom Studios...

Just because....

Happy weekend, everybody!

The Making of Peter Gabriel's "Security"

In two parts... these are quite long, but hell, it's Friday, and I know you're probably all screwing around at work anyway. "Security" was the first Peter Gabriel album I ever bought, and it made an amazing impact on me. I bought it on an elementary school trip to Montreal back when I lived in New Hampshire. I bought it on cassette and listened to it on my Walkman. I was so hypnotized by the album, that I declined joining my classmates on a trip to an amusement park so I could just sit and listen to the album over and over. To this day, it remains one of my favorite albums and I think if you removed some of the flanging and phasing effects that sort of date it, it still sounds far ahead of a lot of electronic music that's made today. Anyway, if you share my love of the album, this documentary is fascinating to watch, as it reveals a lot of the sources of the sounds used on the album, early versions of the songs, as well as the inspiration behind the music.

Part One


Part Two

Bored of Canada?

(Props to 'funkyappledog' for pointing out this technique many years ago in this thread...)

In case you've been living in a cave for the past decade or so, Boards of Canada are two Scottish brothers who have forged one of the most interesting and identifiable sounds in electronic music in recent memory. Some have claimed the music reminds them of their childhood and the warped educational films they used to see in school. Personally, I always thought their music was the closest anyone had come to capturing an acid trip in audio form. Not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.

Part of the the fuzzy, psychedelic quality of their music comes from their process of recording instruments to old, beat up tape machines, which gives the music a warped, slightly seasick quality. As often happens in electronic music, people pretty much immediately latched onto this sound and wondered how they could reproduce it without having to forge in Grandpa's attic to track down a tape machine of their own. Fortunately, if you work in Logic, you already have a plug-in that will reproduce this effect quite readily: Tape Delay. Here's how you do it.

1. Call up the track you wish to warp and apply a Tape Delay to the insert.
2. In the upper lefthand corner of the Tape Delay window, make sure Sync is turned off, and adjust the Delay value to around 10ms.
3. In the Output section, turned the Dry level all the way down, and the Wet level all the way up so you are only getting the effected sound.
3. Adjust the LFO rate to taste (.54Hz works nicely). Push up the LFO depth as well (73% will do fine).
4. Now adjust your Flutter rate (something toward the low end) and Flutter Intensity to taste (try around 65%).

If you've done everything correctly, you should end up with something that sounds not unlike this little example I threw together quickly...

Goldbaby Give Away Tape TR-66

Goldbaby, who have made quite the name for themselves recently by releasing both free and commercial sets of classic drum machine samples that have been recorded on vintage tape machines, have released yet another free set, this one based on Roland's old preset beatbox the TR-66 (not to be confused with the TR-606). The set includes 113 24-bit isolated hits and 7 REX files of the preset rhythms.

GO GET THEM

Korg DS-10 Available in The US

Via Matrixsynth:

The Korg DS-10, an emulation of Korg's classic MS-10 that runs on the Nintendo DS is finally available domestically, and it's cheap too!

Mac Software for the Weak of Will

Found via The Music of Sound:

The other day I read an article that said when the average worker checks their email during the work day, it takes them an average of 16 minutes to get back to the task at hand. The irony of this is that I was reading the article when I really should've been finishing a remix I was working on.

If you're a Mac user and are easily distracted by shiny things on the internet, a new utility called Freedom may help. Basically, the program deactivates your network connections for a user-defined period of time, so even if you WANT to, you can't check your email, sign on to chat programs, or waste hours arguing with people you don't know on Fark. The program is free to try, but the author asks for a $10 donation if you find the program useful.

Logic's Little Known 'Capture As Recording' Feature

Like many of you, I often come up with musical ideas by improvising. I'll call up a drum loop or program a simple drum part, press 'play', and I'll just mess around with different riffs over the drum loop until I come up with something interesting. Sometimes, though, I'll end up playing something by accident that sounds great, but that I can't replay accurately to save my life. Luckily, Logic has a little known feature to deal with just this scenario: the Capture as Recording feature. Logic is basically always recording MIDI information whether you tell it to or not, it's just a matter of accessing this 'hidden' MIDI recording.

Here's how to do it:
1. Open up a new Logic project and load up the softsynth of your choice.

2. Press 'PLAY' and play something on your keyboard.

3. Now press 'STOP'. You'll note that since you were not recording the MIDI data, nothing appears in your arrange window. It's there, though!

4. Press the Command Key in combination with the * key on your numeric keypad. If you've followed the directions correctly, the little riff you just played should now appear on the softsynth track in your arrange window.

A couple of important notes:
- Logic only 'remembers' the MIDI info between the time you press 'play' and the time you press 'stop'. So if you press 'play', play a riff, then press 'stop' and hit 'play' again, you will lose the first recording and it will be replaced by whatever you play until you hit 'stop' again.

- This feature can only be accessed via key commands, so if you don't have a numeric keypad, or if you simply don't like the key assignment for this feature, you can reassign it under the Preferences > Key Commands... menu.

Free Studio Electronics ATC-1 Samples

Bobby Wilks, creator of the "Vector Field" sample library for M-Audio, was kind enough to email me with this link to an excellent set of samples he made of the Studio Electronics ATC-1 synth. Included are a dozen multisampled instruments in EXS, Kontakt, Halion3, and Reason formats. While you're at it, you may also want to check out Bobby's music.