Strange as it may sound, the studio isn't all about the music for me. Live-pa is equal parts music and technology, and some days it's quite hard to figure out which parts I enjoy most. The thrill of the tech is that often, there's nobody else on the planet working on quite the same problem as I am, and the challenge is what keeps me coming back to it year after year. The live-pa rig is more than a collection of parts; it is a finely tuned machine, a carefully crafted system, a weapon of bass destruction.
I'm fond of telling friends and detractors alike, "every man needs a model train set. mine just happens to make techno."
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Bits about what MUX is brewing up in the studio
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Wednesday, 08 March 2006 |
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heh!
in the last few days, I've gone from feeling liberated and productive, to feeling panicked and despondant, back to feeling relieved and hopeful.
Back story - my buds in Calgary have booked me to headline a party there in early May. That's just the push I needed to get off my ass and work on my liveset every day - not that I wasn't working on techno anyway, but there's a difference between the 'puttering and experimenting' days and the 'focused and working on a liveset' days. Those Calgary guys rule, and a couple of them recently threw it down hard at a party we threw here in Van, so I absolutely *must* blow the roof off the place. That basically means having a solid, kickass liveset and practicing the hell out of it, preferably on a few big soundsystems. The live rig, however, is not currently in a "playable" state, and I've got about six unfinished tracks on the desk... and I'll need a few more tracks on top of that before Summer.
So in my last post here, I mentioned dropping the MPC in favour of my ThinkPad running Ableton Live. I worked all weekend porting my older tracks into Live, as well as all the basslines I recorded a few weeks ago, a new set of 20-some kickdrums made in Stomper, and 40-odd weird rhythmic percussion loops made in the insane drumcloset (note to self, post pic of drumcloset here). I grabbed a pirated copy of Native Instruments Battery2, against my better judgement (it would be the only pirated software in my rig), and ported over most of the one-hit drum samples and vocal snippets from my MPC set into two instances of Battery2.
Anyway, things were coming along swimmingly - tracks were starting to take shape, everything was looking good... but this was all on my desktop PC. Tuesday night, I decided to give it a whirl on the laptop, just to see how it would work. Good thing I checked, 'cause what do you know, the laptop is simply NOT gutsy enough to handle even the most cut-down set!!
PANIC! WTF DO I DO!!
I started playing around with some latency settings, but no matter what I did, I was still sitting at about 60% CPU utilization, and was getting dropouts, weird audible glitches, and the odd nasty highpitched whine. After experimenting for a few hours, I figured out that over 20% of the CPU use was Battery2! When I removed it from Live, suddenly CPU usage went down to about 38%, and the audio glitches completely stopped.
So there came the question - with my music style I have to play back short samples a lot. I could use Ableton's free sampler 'Impulse', but that's only eight samples per track in Live, and I really don't want to have to have like 20 tracks just for samples. I could render the samples out to audio clips, but as the set is currently in development, I really need to maintain the flexibility to change the patterns.
Basically, I needed a software MPC replacement that could hold a tonne of samples on a single channel, took very little CPU, was stable and sounded good, had good control over the individual samples' sound (filters, envelopes, etc), and preferably that had a slightly better sequencing interface than the (*yuck*) Live piano roll. Don't get me wrong, the piano roll is great, just not for drum maps! Live could really use another MIDI sequencing interface or three... or better yet the ability to route MIDI out of VSTi's, so you could use VST MIDI sequencers.
Anyway, as I was wondering where I was going to find this magic software that'd do all the functions of an MPC, it suddenly dawned on me... there's already an MPC sitting right there. :)
So yeah. The new rig seems to be stabilizing as: SH-101, x0xb0x and Nord Micro Modular for synths, MPC1000 for drum sequencing, MIDI sequencing and one-shot samples, Ableton Live for looped samples and mixing of all audio sources (via MOTU 828mkII and Behringer BFR2000 control surface). Simple, straight forward, and makes sense. It's not as cut down as I would have liked, but we'll see - maybe there'll be more changes in the future, but for this upcoming show at least this setup should kick major ass.
Anyway, fortunately I've been saving all the audio I'm working on, so all the percussive loops and basslines and kicks are still useful... though I've basically fucked myself out of the last two weekend's worth of working on sequencing and arrangement. Oh well, at least I know now, and I have a clear path forward - I have a *lot* of work to do, but at least it's all set out in front of me. I've got just under two months to get a full hour of music together, rehearsed and awesome, so expect more posts here in the near future. :) Goddamn, doing live-pa is a lot of work!
Oh - one final note - if you're looking for a good software EQ, check out Elemental Audio's "Eqium", it's fucking *awesome*. It sounds great, super easy to use, and it's lightweight enough to use on every channel. I've been using the demo tonnes, and I think I'm actually going to buy it - this will be the first VST I've ever bought!
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Bits about what MUX is brewing up in the studio
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Wednesday, 01 March 2006 |
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Well, the writing is going well - I've setup a "loop station" in the closet, comprised of the ER-1 MIDI-out driving the Simmons SDS-800 and SDS-9 and the TR-707's audio outputs triggering the newly-acquired Tama TechStar TS-305 drumsynth. I'm a sucker for old drumsynths, it would seem - I'd be all over the Waldorf Rack Attack if it just had a better interface, but I don't see much value in it over the software version.
Speaking of software, the new MPC OS didn't work out nearly as well as I'd hoped. There's still a few crash bugs, for instance, but really my main beef is with the "slice" feature. I mean, it seems so obvious - if I want to sample my basslines, just make a bassline on the synths in the studio, record it into Live, tweak the loop until it's perfect, then export the loop and play it back in the MPC, right? With the 'slice' feature, I should be able to cut that loop into 8 chunks, then play it back as eighth-note samples, it should sound perfect, right? And maybe I can screw with the order of the loops to create new basslines, right?
Wrong. Turns out the feature is optimized for drum loops, and adds 5ms of silence between samples, so it doesn't play back sounding the same as it went in. Furthermore, there seems to be some kind of weirdness with Ableton Live exporting loops, so what sounds sample-accurate *perfect* in Live comes out sounding like it's off by a few ms, which changes the whole feel of the bass.
I've now spent, on *three* seperate occasions, the entire afternoon trying to get stuff that already sounds awesome in Live to port over to the MPC1000 smoothly, and it's just not working out. Live can't export multi-track MIDI files, and the MPC has problems importing single-track MIDI files. If there's too much bass in Live, I can adjust it, too much bass in a sample loop on the MPC requires more tweaking. And so on, and so on. All this silly file management crap is really starting to cut into my creativity.
Anyway - screw it. I'm going to try assembling a live set using Ableton Live as the center piece. I still have a problem with people who stare at their laptops for their whole live set, so I'm going to try my best to keep all the control interfaces... I'm going to try to setup my BFR2000 so that I don't have to touch or look at the laptop at all. I'm still planning to bring out my SH-101, x0xb0x, Nord Modular, etc - the only thing that's really currently changing is that it may well be the end of the MPC1000 in my live rig. :(
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Bits about what MUX is brewing up in the studio
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Thursday, 19 January 2006 |
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Akai released the new MPC1000 OS today. :)
YAY! Just in time for the weekend!
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Bits about what MUX is brewing up in the studio
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Wednesday, 18 January 2006 |
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A friend of mine, who calls himself "Mander" online, has as his .sig a quote from a commercial: "McCain! What have you done with my fries!".
I kinda feel that way: "Akai! What have you done with my MPC1000 2.0 OS!".
Seriously. It was announced in like November, with the caveat "will be available in a week or two". I turned down a New Years Eve gig thinking "well, the new OS will be out mid-December, and I won't really have time to take advantage of all the new features before the gig...".
The new features look *insane*, btw. The top three that I'm looking forward to:
- Sample reverse. OMG, why was this missing in the first place?!? To take, say, a basskick and reverse it, which is a SUPER standard techno trick (like, drop out the kick for four beats, then play a reverse kick and drop back into the standard 4/4 kick pattern), is SO simple a trick... but on the current MPC1000 OS, you have to basically flip the sample using something like Soundforge and load it as an entirely different sample. Seriously, how hard is it to play the sample backwards?
- Start and end loop points using the "Q-Link" sliders. Alright, another one that should have been obvious from the get-go. The "Q-Link" sliders are pretty much useless - in the current iteration of the MPC1k OS, they're used for tuning samples, but ONLY if 1.) you're currently recording the pattern (ie, playing the beats on the pads), or 2.) you have that sample's "program" selected in the "MAIN" screen. Live, this is almost impossible. Like, in a given live set, I have a good 20-30 "programs" loaded (one for the SDS-800 samples, one for 909 samples, one for vocal samples PER TRACK, etc). In my dream world, I could arbitrarily assign a MIDI CC# to the Q-Link sliders and use them as MIDI controllers - say, one maps to the filter cutoff of my bassline? Now *that* would be useful.
- TIMESTRETCH. Holy crap. About frickin' time. "Yeah, Akai, I like to work with loops, but I think it's better if we think like it's 1995 and loops can't possibly change BPM without changing pitch...". Seriously.. wtf? Apparently the new OS, you can feed it a loop, tell it the BPM, and then tell it a new BPM and it'll just stretch the loop for you without (too many) audible artifacts. This was such a problem before, that I personally REFUSED to use any audio loops in my live rig, just because it was such a pain to change the tempo of a track (ie, you'd have to take every audio loop out of the sampler, into the computer, change the tempo, and reload it into the sampler).
God. Please. GIVE ME THE NEW MPC1000 OS OR KILL ME!#@$!
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Bits about what MUX is brewing up in the studio
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Monday, 09 January 2006 |
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Well, that month went by a little too quickly...
I had this fantastic plan of spending every day of my week-long Christmas holiday in the studio, hammering out new techno. That failed, almost completely - I doubt I spent more than 10 hours total in the studio. At least I got a bunch of new basslines written.
I'm exploring a new route for bass... before, I was always sequencing my basslines using MIDI on the MPC1000, driving my Waldorf Pulse Plus. The Pulse plugged into the mixer, which had one channel of my DBX166XL compressor inserted into that channel's insert jack, and the kick was sidechained into the DBX, so the bassline ducked out of the way to allow the kick through.
Now, since I've faded the mixer and replaced it with a laptop running Plogue Bidule, I've decided to also fade the Pulse, and replace it with sampled bassline loops (sampled from the Pulse). The tricky bit I've been playing with is sampling the loops as one and a half bars, instead of just one bar... one beat before the bar, one beat after the bar. Whenever Akai releases the new OS, which supposedly allows setting the start and endpoints of a sample loop using the MPC's "q-link" sliders, I should be able to dial the bassline and kick in to get a supremely tight low end. :) I tried playing with software compression, but just wasn't able to find any software compressors that had the options and good sound of my DBX, so my bass and kick compression is staying hardware. I'd like to try switching it out for a Drawmer or something, we'll see in a few months.
Seven new basslines written, all stompy as fuck. I'm still nowhere *near* being able to play a set, and it's almost February... combined with the fact that GI Jody and I are putting together a massive techno party on February 18th, I don't foresee myself being able to play live until at least March, maybe later. :(
Oh well, this time off is good; it gives me a chance to rethink my sound, regroup and move forward with the techno... I can't keep playing the same songs over and over!
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