sndmx-blog

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Remixing tips

Here's a good post from Computer Music magazine. The article discusses about different tips you can use when working with a remix of an existing track. If you find yourself stuck with the process try some of these out.

[sndmx-blog]

DJ Build Ups

Here's couple of really cool video tutorials by Ean Golden again. Simple tricks how you can add tension and excitement to your DJ sets.

The first video shows you how to use Beat Masher with a controller.The second video is all about echo.

Cool and simple stuff that keeps your crowd coming back for more.

[sndmx-blog]

The Science of Beatmaking

I'll quickly drop you this tutorial I found from Prime Loops titled "The Science of Beatmaking".

The first post talks about the basics of a drum sound, the second digs into layering of the sounds, and the third how to "glue" things together.

Worth checking out.

[sndmx-blog]

Traktor Pro and Livid Ohm64

You can do great things with DJ software and midi controllers! I'm currently using Traktor with my SL-1200's but I just love adding a controller to the mix. The control over the software is just amazing.

There are many different controllers to choose from. Here's a good video how to use Traktor Pro with Livid Ohm64. It has just a perfect amount of buttons and sliders to control the DJ software.

Check out the video and download the midi map from Livid blog.

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Traktor Pro FX Tutorials by Ean Golden

I found some really cool video tutorials about how to use effects creatively in Traktor Pro. These four FX tricks can really add flavor to your DJ sets.

The first video shows how to spice up your beat masher/repeater effect. It chains up three different effects (beat masher, filter, and reverb) to make the beat masher more interesting.

The second video shows how to transition between two songs with different tempos. The trick is to use a delay and freeze effect. Really cool.

The third video shows how you can create synth sounds from any song by looping a tiny piece of the song and adding some effects to the sound.

The fourth and final video shows how to use the BeatSlicer effect in a beat juggle type of action. Really cool sounding stuff.

Check out the tutorial videos by Ean Golden from Dj Tech Tools.

[sndmx-blog]

Ableton Live Megaset by Tom Cosm

Anyone who's performing live sets with Ableton Live should definitely check out how Tom Cosm creates his live sets. I use pretty similar technique in my live sets, although I have only one channel for each instrument (not two like Tom Cosm has in his set). But as you can see from the video, the routing options give you infinite amount of options how to build your sets. I usually send all my synth tracks to a track called Basher and this particular track has all kinds of glitch and distortion effects added to it. So I can easily transform the synth tones from mellow to very aggressive, and this has worked in so many occasions. Bringing in the element fo surprise and real live action. Anyway, I was inspired by Cosm's tutorials, probably you will be too.

See the video on Youtube

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Audio warping in Cubase 4

I use Cubase 4 as the core of my studio. I have tested Ableton a few times and I've been really impressed of the workflow and some of the features, but I'm still sticking with Cubase. Audio warping is something that I have always associated with Ableton. If you work with samples you will ran across the warping feature in Ableton really fast. And it works really well of the box. Now I found a tutorial how you can implement the "Ableton like" audio warping in Cubase. It's behind a few clicks but seems to work pretty well after you find it. This really opens up few new possibilities to my workflow.

Read the tutorial at audio tuts+

[sndmx-blog]

QA with the sound guys of The Social Network

The Awards season blog in New York TImes covered nicely the problems of one particular scene in The Social Network in this article. The article is not about Trent Reznor or Atticus Ross. The article interviews Ren Klyce, one of the sound designer guys of The Social Network production team. 

Mr. Klyce tells how they were approached by David Fincher and asked to pump up the music volume in club scene where Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker are having a business conversation. The club scene is of course super noisy already so they were facing problems: How do we make the actor voices to stand out from the noise and background music? The article does not reveal their exact secrets, but it makes you think all the effect processing chains they might have used: Saturation, side-chaining etc.

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Using Ableton Live's Utility tool in mixing

I've always hated the mixing phase when creating a song. I'm more like the creative guy who likes throwing in ideas/sounds, manipulating those and, in the end, creating something weird and experimental out of them. It's fun! But mixing is usually tedious work and it takes time before you hear the results. It all depends how well you have built the song. I nowadays always EQ and level new tracks when I'm creating the song, and it reduces the mixing workload a lot in the end. This tutorial on Dubspot nicely explains how the Utility tool in Ableton Live can also help you to achieve better mixes by controlling the width of stereo sounds on individual tracks or groups. Brilliant stuff!

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Creative gating

Here's three good video tutorials by Matt Fordham about creative gating. The tutorials are showing some basics about how to use side-chained gate to achieve nice results on your mixes. The tutorials are done with Pro Tools LE but they are of course really easy to implement with the DAW of your choice.

The first tutorial is about adding a low end to a drum mix, the second video is about applying a pulsing effect to a synth pad, and the third is about cleaning up a drum mix.

Enjoy.

[sndmx-blog]

5 Simple Ways to Add Punch to Your Drum Parts

In this tutorial Mo Volans introduces five simple techniques to spice up your drum mixes. Really easy to follow tutorial with good audio samples. The selected weapons are gate, eq, compression, transient design, and saturation and distortion. Check it out.

Read full tutorial at Audio Tuts+