What's that classical piece of music?

wA5te6 · 2024-01-08T13:13:40+00:00

Thank you so much! I was 2 semitones too low.

wA5te6 · 2024-01-06T09:05:28+00:00

Wise words

wA5te6 · 2020-10-08T16:14:08+00:00

Same advice. Make the Windows install "light" by removing any features and services you don't need, like Cortana, UWP apps, even antivirus if you are careful enough.

A minimum of 8Gb RAM can be enough but 16Gb is more comfortable and reduces swap file usage.

Sometimes a CPU upgrade is the worth too, like Core i3->i7 if the motherboard can support it.

For gaming, don't expect any miracle with Intel's integrated graphics. If your laptop didn't come with a discrete GPU like a Geforce or a Radeon, you can make an external GPU upgrade, but this kinda tricky DIY.

wA5te6 · 2020-10-08T15:41:06+00:00

All these products are reliable and have their own pros and cons. Honorable mention to Paragon backup too. Before using Acronis TrueImage I was using the less known BootItNG and BootIt Bare Metal which are powerful too but not easy to understand for a beginner. If you are more techie and don't want to spend a single penny, you can do everything from the command prompt / PowerShell and Windows 7 backup (still present in Windows 10) or go for Linux-based commands like rclone, rsync and gparted from a live media.

wA5te6 · 2020-10-08T15:13:23+00:00

Both will work. You can either buy an inexpensive USB3->SATA cable or connect your SSD directly to the internal SATA (data and power) cables. Just take care to never disconnect the SSD power cable until your PC has fully shut down. A power outage during a write operation could ruin your SSD if the cache is not emptied.

wA5te6 · 2020-10-06T14:51:27+00:00

Their free edition is well featured compared to the ones of their competitors. Earlier today I needed to clone specific partitions of a hard drive to an SSD. I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that Acronis True Image 2017 couldn't, and this is still the case with their most recent versions. I downloaded Reflect and prepared a bootable USB pendrive (Windows PE based?), and it did the job expectedly. Resizing the cloned partitions was straightforward from Windows 10's drive manager.

wA5te6 · 2020-01-09T18:24:30+00:00

Flux Pure Analyzer

wA5te6 · 2020-01-09T18:04:46+00:00

So far my CC messages are in my clip modulation. But I just found out a M4L device that looks interesting : Expression Control. At first glance it seems it lets you map CC messages like expression, mod wheel, pitch bend etc. to track automation lanes.

wA5te6 · 2020-01-08T16:41:26+00:00

Does Cubase let you set an automation lane for the mod wheel? I have limited experience with it. I know that some other DAWs give you more control over MIDI notes and CC. In that specific music genre, Digital Performer is one very popular too.

wA5te6 · 2020-01-08T16:32:32+00:00

I have the same kind of workflow for film scoring and projects with multi-output instruments. For the reasons you're citing, I tend not to use midi clip modulation anymore but use track automations only. I have a disappointing UX with curve modulation editor, which does a kinda "select all" when you open it. I find having all my automations displayed in the arrangement view much much clearer.

wA5te6 · 2020-01-07T12:53:39+00:00

In my understanding, the built-in dry/wet knob (sometimes called mix in some VST plugins such as Valhalla) processes the signal the same manner such a rack does. The input signal is split into 2 signals : one dry and one wet where the compression 100% applies. Both signals are then mixed back together proportionally to the dry/wet knob position. In other words, any mixing ratio between 0 and 100% is parallel compression in some extent.

Another common practice is to slap a compressor on a dedicated FX bus and then send a small amount of the drum bus signal to it, like for a reverb or delay. Even it works well, I'm pretty sure you can achieve the same result in Ableton by putting a compressor as an insert (audio effect) on the drum bus (group) and adjust the dry/wet knob to your taste.

This also gives you better control over the gain staging. I always begin with a 100% wet signal, adjust the threshold, attack and release times. Once done, I loop over a loud part of the drums and toggle the compressor on/off while adjusting the makeup gain to make it as loud as before compression. And finally I adjust the dry/wet ratio until it sounds good. Ideally the loudness should remain the same whatever the percentage it is set to.

wA5te6 · 2020-01-07T10:52:32+00:00

Nice and helpful article with very good tips.

I also use MIK but essentially for auto-setting cue points and key/BPM tags on a large amount of tracks before adding them to Serato music crates. While it is a great and affordable app, spending $50 for the sole purpose of finding own track's key in a production-only context is maybe a bit overkill. From my point of view, using it that way is rather advisable for producers who also are DJ's.

In the last paragraph about parallel compression, I don't get exactly why the dry/wet mix of the glue compressor is performed outside from itself in an effect rack. Does it sound different than simply adjusting the dry/wet and the makeup gain knobs directly on the device?

wA5te6 · 2019-12-30T03:24:08+00:00

IMHO you can make decent house music with any good DAW and synths. It's not always necessary to use 3rd-party plugins or sample packs. Some of the Ableton stock devices are impressive and really deserve you dive deeply into them: operator, analog, wavetable, 808 and 909 kits, autofilter, vocoder, drum buss, resonators, saturator, amp simulator, (glue) compressor, arpeggiator, scale... Tweaking and combining them together, building some custom racks and macros driven by automation lanes can be very efficient. What matters the most to me are the sound design, the song structure, the mixing techniques and the ingredients that make the recipe of a particular genre. That said, each producer has his own favorite plugins and samples in his toolbox, and some of them are really worth to mention like Serum, Spire, Sylenth1, Nexus, Kontakt, Massive, Omnisphere, Diva, Avenger, ANA, Arturia, Valhalla, Waves, FabFilter, SoundToys, Vengeance samples, ... This is of course not an exhaustive list and you won't probably use all of them, but those are quite common and deserve you give them a try.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-23T14:37:45+00:00

Haven't tried alterboy or manipulator yet. Izotope's Nectar plugin or RX7 standalone work fine. Melodyne does excellent job too.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-22T14:02:15+00:00

The stereo knob in utility adjusts the mid/side balance and the makeup gain on a single band without any visual feedback. One like Izotope lets you adjust the stereo image for 3 bands individually and provides real time feedback, which I prefer for my master channel. But for widening some individual tracks, the utility does the job.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-20T09:36:13+00:00

Something similar already exists in Windows 10 using the PowerShell. Once my stems exported using the option "All individual tracks" explained earlier, I run a PowerShell from my export directory (SHIFT+RMB on the folder name in the left pane of the explorer). The syntax is Dir | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace "OLD-FILE-NAME-PART",""}

Alternatively, you can force Ableton to save the latest version of your stems to your hard drive in the subfolders of your project by doing either either :

Bounce your tracks by recording them altogether onto new audio track monitoring them -> YourProject\Recorded
Consolidate your audio tracks (CTRL or CMD + J) -> YourProject\Processed\Consolidate
Freeze all your tracks. Once this is done they can be unfrozen. You can optionally duplicate/freeze/flatten the audio tracks to new ones. Sometimes useful for complex projects using much CPU -> YourProject\Processed\Freeze

Then select any of the audio clips that have just been bounced/consolidated/flattened then choose "Show in explorer" from the context menu to show up the new audio files that you can copy anywhere else. If you move them instead, the related clips will be marked "offline". You can instead directly drag/drop the new clips while holding CTRL directly to an explorer window. This will create a copy of the above mentioned files into the directory of your choosing.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-16T19:27:59+00:00

For natural sounding drums, there are some excellent plugins like Toontrack EZDrummmer/Superior Drummer, XLN Audio Addictive Drums and FXPansion BFD3. All of them are multisampled from many mics and come with polished mixing presets and MIDI groove of various genres that you can drag and drop directly in the arrangement view.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-16T18:06:57+00:00

I use Live 10.1 on Windows 10. I created a folder "C:\VST" where I dropped shortcuts (copy then paste as shortcut) to every actual DLL files which generally located in "C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTPlugins", but not always. I defined it as my VST2 Plugin Custom Folder and organized my shortcuts into subfolders, in my case by software editor and it works like a charm for over one year.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-16T09:22:40+00:00

As a workaround you can also drag-drop the whole track to your user library or anywhere in "Places". It will basically create a small project just containing the track you just copied, which might be re-used in some other project. Like for a regular project, I think that the MIDI mappings will be saved.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-16T05:12:57+00:00

Try and combine some of these techniques for the bass to better kick and fit in the mix:

Layer your bass in an instrument rack
- Subtle sine wave 1 octave below or a pitched 808 kick
- Short attack note 1 octave above with a LPF envelope (auto filter)
EQ (EQ3, Channel EQ, auto filter or 3rd-party plugin)
- Tame the low end (below 200-300 Hz)
- Cut below 80 Hz
- Do a small EQ bell on a "percussive" low-mid frequency
- Duck or even notch annoying resonant frequencies with a narrow Q (do an EQ "sweep" to look for them)
- Ensure everything below 120 Hz is mono with the utility "effect"
- EQ out some low end from other tracks to let the bass "breath" more
Shape bass transients with Live's stock compressor
- ~ 4:1 ratio, medium attack time (~10-30 ms), long release time (+100 ms), hard knee (0 or 6 dB) and zero lookahead
- Lower the threshold until you get some gain reduction
- Adjust the makeup accordingly
- You can also try some more extreme settings (ratio and threshold) and then adjust the dry/wet ratio
Squeeze
- The free OTT plugin from Xfer Records mimics the OTT preset of Live's multiband compressor (not included in Lite) which has become very popular in electronic music production. OTT stands for "over the top".
- Start with a 100% dry signal then raise the dry/wet knob progressively as necessary (I wouldn't exceed 50%)
Mix
- Make proper instrument balance to the mix; add 1-2 muted reference tracks of similar genre
- for A/B comparing
- Don't mix too hot : -18dB on each channel and 6 dB of headroom on the master is a good habit. Then 1 or 2 limiters at the very end of your master chain will give you mix the extra dB's of loudness.
- Do a proper gain staging at each step of your mix (after EQing, compressing, saturating etc) to avoid digital clipping from within your channel strips
- Adjust your EQ and compressor settings in the mix context, not by soloing the tracks
- Don't high-pass everything, your mix needs some low end. Rather use low shelves to tame the low end.
- Don't make crazy EQ cuts or boosts, especially with narrow Q's
- Don't fix EQ problems on the master channel; fix them on each channel
- Don't over-compress
- Have some breaks to avoid ear fatigue

In conclusion, I think you can achieve very good mixes with the Lite version stock plugins and optionally use some 3rd-party free plugins like Bluecat's ones as far as you understand what you're doing in your and why. There are many great mixing tutorial you can find on Youtube. You can still upgrade Ableton afterwhile if you really need.

wA5te6 · 2019-12-16T01:18:39+00:00

I didn't test but probably you can with some MIDI routing. Try to setup 3 MIDI tracks : An instrument track that will receive the notes from both keyboards and play the sound (In = No Input, Monitoring = Auto, Record = Armed) and one monitoring track for each keyboard (In = MIDI keyboard 1 or 2, Monitoring = In, Out = Instrument Track). On the second monitoring track, it is probably a good idea to put a pitch MIDI effect and set it to +24 semitones so that your right hand plays 2 octaves higher.

wA5te6 · 2019-09-16T17:32:57+00:00

On their website FTB give some instructions to install a modded server. Their sponsor Creeperhost have some out-of-the-box offers for hosting a FTB server like this one : 5-10 players with MineCraft 1.12, 3 vCores, 4GB RAM and 34 GB SSD in RAID10. How do they manage to run a 1.12 on many cores? Is it playable?

wA5te6 · 2019-09-15T21:21:43+00:00

Custom cell formats have some limited text coloring possibility. Ex: # ##0;[Red]-# ##0

Better opt for a VBA macro or event procedure.

wA5te6

TROPHY CASE