Ableton have added a nifty sidechain feature to the Auto Filter plugin. This allows you to modulate your filtering with a routed signal. Just for kicks I’ve put together a little sample of what type of transition effects you can get using this tool.
Sample 1 — This is a couple of loops leading into a new track
Sample 2 — This is a series of 4 or 5 tracks (I forget) leading into one another using various sidechained filtering.
Everyone’s favorite leporid – bunnie – had a BBQ last evening, complete with ridiculously delicious bacon wrapped hot dogs, carne asada, and pot-stickers. Also booze and halo of course. Since I’m always looking for an excuse to sit down and prepare some tunes, I put together a mix for the occasion. Here’s the tracklist and the MP3 download.
V-Sag – Sacred Truth feat Tomomi Ukumori (Original Mix)
Phynn – Starfire at Night (Andy Duguid Remix)
Deepsky – Brambledog (Original Mix)
Distant Fragment, Steve Mill – Utopia (DJ Tarkan / V-Sag Remix)
Hook N Sling – Plastic Wrap (Original Mix)
Melleefresh, Deadmau5 – Attention Whore (Original Mix)
Andrew K – The Coriolis Effect (Simon Firth Remix)
PQM – You Are Sleeping (PQM Meet Luke Cable Vocal Pass)
I put together a quick mix to test some new production techniques. It came out pretty good, so I feel like there was some good progress this time around. These are some fun tracks, the new techniques let me put them together which would have been much more difficult before.
If anybody likes hearing these details, this is what I did differently this time around:
Dynamic range adjusted to center around a more “CD friendly” range. Beatport tracks seem to be designed with a very loud thumping club system in mind, so the dynamic range is quite broad. The affect is that if you do not alter this dynamic range, the quiet instruments and transients are inaudible due to the loud thumping bass and louder instruments. As I learn more about how to make beatport tracks more CD friendly, I’ll post a more thorough article.
Avoiding warp mode completely, whenever possible. Ableton has very good warping algorithms. Unfortunately, you can still definitely tell the difference. I also believe now that warping artifacts become accentuated when additional processing is done (compression, etc). An unwarped track has a little bit extra warmth and there are some subtle details that are lost through warping. To my ears, this made a big difference.
Cross-fader in addition to sidechain compression during all transitions. After analyzing the waveform of my resulting mixes, I noticed that the transitions were significantly louder than the body of a track. This makes sense, because I was layering two tracks at equal volume. The only reason this wasn’t super obvious is that a good limiter goes a pretty long way at automatically evening these out for you. Avoiding them in the first place with cross fading, however, is a much better option. Subtle details are retained, and you get to be a bit more playful with the energy progression throughout your transitions this way. Obviously cross-fading is a pretty standard DJ tool, but I wasn’t harnessing it before.
Voxengo Elephant – If you produce/DJ, and you haven’t seen this plug-in, I urge you to check it out. This is the best limiter I’ve found. Most limiters you find, you’ll like them at first, but after you listen to them under various scenarios, you end up finding things wrong. This one is really solid and can be super transparent. This lets you kick up the overall volume of your mix without clipping. Combined with dynamic range altering, the volume gets kicked way up without hurting audio quality (in fact, it ends up sounding *better* since you can hear the details).
My holy grail at the moment is a method to decibel-histogram match (or at least, the ability to alter the dynamic range via histogram manipulation). I think this would be a very valuable tool. I’m exploring how this might be done with image processing tools on adobe audition’s export/import to BMP features.
Seva K. – The Jungle of Music (Sebastian Davidson Mix)
Chris Lake + Trophy Twins – Babaloo (Original Mix)
Moonbeam – Sky (Vocal Mix)
Moonbeam – Seeming Reflection
Petter – All Together
EDC 2008 was a blast! We live in San Diego, and the event was in LA, so we had a couple hours of traffic on the way there. I just started using some new VST plugins, so it was the perfect opportunity to check out how they sound in a thumpin M3 car stereo. [download MP3]
Probspot – Blueberry (Peter Haze Remix) Moonbeam – Consumption feat. Chris Lunsford (Original Mix) ID – ID Medway – The Bassline Track (Luke Chable Remix) Retroid – Daybreak (The Emissary Remix) V.F.R. – Tranceillusion (Luke Dzierzek Remix) Sebastien Tellier – Divine (Danger Remix)
Discovered a powerful heuristic for track selection which helps you to find track combinations that “work” very well together. “Mixing in key” is a fairly popular method for track selection. Basically you want to find tracks that are “compatible” in a musical way. I’ve found that following the circle of fifths either clockwise or counterclockwise, always skipping 3, leads to some really astonishing results.
Here’s an experiment, using counter-clockwise circle of fifths traversal on the song keys. Note that some tracks end in a different key than they start, so you always have to take that into account.
What happens if you take a loop, pitch bend it down to half tempo, while mixing in a new loop at full speed? How about if you combine that with some Ableton pitch-sustaining tempo manipulation? Listen for yourself!
Here’s another experiment, this one with pitch/tempo manipulation up and down. Halfway through creates a pretty cool effect.
I’m sure some other digital DJ has thought to use this technique. I’ll see if I can work it into the next APU mix.
DW – Pillow feat Hannah (Discosynthetique & Miller Remix)
Tasadi, Mike Mikhjian – Zeus (Vadim Zukhov Remix)
DJ Polyakov PPK – Resurrection (VZ Remix)
Alex Young, Artech – Minimalesk (Original Mix)
Long Range – Just One More (Hybrid Mix)
V-Sag – Shakespearean Love feat Ukumori (Original Mix)
This mix starts out with a deep dark-ish DW track remixed by Discosynthetique & Miller, drops into the phenomenal and energetic “Zeus” track, followed by “Resurrection” which is one of my recent favorites.
After this, the mix crawls back down into the very dark and delicious “Just One More” Hybrid Mix, by way of “Minimalesk” — and tempo bends back out of the darkness into a nice V-Sag track “Shakespearean Love”.
The new technique of the week, which I used in every transition, is side chain compression between transitioning tracks. This, especially combined with EQ dodging, creates a back-and-forth rhythm between two tracks. Makes for some really interesting rhythm combination possibilities.
Interesting note — my intro into Pillow is taken from the scene in spaceballs where the huge space ship is slowly panning across the screen. Ran it through some reverb, resonance, and chorus FX and pitch altered.
The whole mix is mastered (the “easy” way) using iZotope Ozone 3, which is a phenomenal tool for mastering for those of us who haven’t spent 20 years learning how to do it the old fashioned ways.
I put together a fresh new mix for the New Year. This set builds smoothly to a nice climax at the end, using some experimental new transition techniques, which I am really starting to like.
The idea is to filter out frequency ranges with an EQ, applying only at particular moments in time defined by the rhythm of the incoming track. This eases transitions, and creates a nice ‘chopping’ effect.
Anyway, click the above Play button, or download from the link below.
Roland Klinkenberg – On My Mind (Mashtronic Remix)
Moonbeam – Cocoon (Sunset Mix)
Roland Klinkenberg – Stir It Up (Original Mix)
Pryda – Europa (Original Mix)
Eluna – Severance (Markus Schulz vs Elevation Remix)
Silent Breed – Sync In (Popof Remix)
Quest, Luke Chable – Skyline Road (DJ Remy Remix)
Steve T. – There Where Lights (Moonbeam Remix)
Spex – Hypnotique (Junk Science Remix)
JES – Ghost (Phynn Remix)
Hybrid – Last Man Standing (Original Mix)
C.O.U. Muzik – The 9:30 Express (Sean McClellan Remix)
Mischa Daniels – Off My Rocker (Original Mix)
Sweeney & Stowasser – Cognition Intermission (Original Mix)
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Caustik – NYE 2008 : 
caustik's blog 