I’ve been very busy with other stuff than music lately, mostly job/date/vacation related, so there haven’t been many updates.
Just wanted to let you know, i’ll be back with more stuff later, but i have to get some things on track right now.

I’ve had a nice gig with DJ HouseContainer for the end of the season for ice-hockey, some pics can be found here.

I’ve also been planning my summer vacation, which will be a roadtrip from LA to NYC, more info can be found here.

So, only thing left to say is: i’ll be back!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I took the preset: Analog – Pad Bandpass and completely changed it around.

It’s too long to tell you what i changed, just have a look at this screenshot:

I added a saturator, to create a little “rock overdrive” sound.
There’s also a compressor which i sidechained to get the sound from the Impulse track (to give i a little “pump” effect).
I mapped most controls to my Xone and had a little jam.

The first fader is mapped to the attack setting on the Analog device (on the amp) (from 5ms to 60ms)
The second fader is mapped to the hacker device to create the stuttering sound (wet/dry)
The third fader is mapped to the saturator (wet/dry).
The knobs above that are mapped to the rest of the group controls.

I think it turned out okay! Work in progress so to say!

(Btw, Impulse uses some clips from the Vengeance sound sets)

I also ordered a couple of books on FM synths, so i’ll keep you up te date about them in the next couple of weeks.

And, a quick tip for people who missed the link i posted earlier: http://max4live.info/
Brilliant FREE video tutorials for M4L! So be sure to check that site out!

Not much to say otherwise, i’ve been busy this week, so no updates on Ableton or Max.

I took a couple of pics to show a little bit of the setup we had today.

[Show as slideshow]

What does it do exactly? Well, my usual DJ set is build up of 3 music channels and a couple of acapella and effect channels.

When i’m DJing, it would be very handy to have a tool so i could jump directly to a clip that’s playing in a particular channel, so i could see the waveform and upcoming breaks and jump back to another channel which i’m currently working on.
So after printing out the Live Object Model documentation from Max for Live, i began to figure out how to put it all together. I also wanted to make it modular so i could add or remove channels easily.
I ended up with this:

All the magic happens in the OS.JumpToPlayingClip patch. The left input just waits for a bang (that’s a “do stuff” message in Max) and the right input selects the track (tracks start at zero and count up from there, so track 5 in Ableton is track 4 in Max). As you can see, i don’t use track 1 for my music . The loadbang object just “clicks” the message on load of the patch, so everything will be set up and waiting for me clicking on the button.
Let’s take a look at my little JumpToPlayingClip patch:

It’s a little more complicated, but i’ll try to explain it.
Input 2 gets the track id from the main patch. It sends it to the left to the “prepend” object so that you’ll basically end up with a “goto live_set tracks <tracknumber>” message which is send to the “live.path” object which return the actual object (a track object).
Input 2 also sends it to the right input of the message on the right (on the picture, it’s set to 4). Sending it to the right input just “sets” it, but doesn’t actually trigger the message.

Input 1 just waits for a bang (click event from the button). When it gets that, it sends the command “get playing_slot_index” to the track object i got above. Whatever it returns, it gets sent to the “route” object which just filters out the “playing_slot_index” message. The output of this control is just a clip slot number instead of a list of values (which we don’t need).

That number gets send to the if command and to the bottom right message (we’ll get to that in a second).
The “if” command checks if the number is 0 or more, because if a track is NOT playing a clip it returns -1 (although during testing i also saw -2, which i can’t find anywhere in the manual (?)). If it’s playing a clip it just “bangs” the output which triggers two messages to be sent.

The first message to send is the track number which is set by input 2 (see above) and it sends it the M4L.api command to select a track. Max for live actually includes a lot of these little helpful patches which will save you a lot of headache and time!

The second message that is triggered sends the clip slot number which is set by the “route” command above to the M4L.api command to select the scene.

That’s it! Not really too hard, but took a beginner like me some time to figure it all out. I know there are easier ways and that in a couple of months i’ll look at this and laugh, but for someone who just got M4L this weekend and never worked in Max before, i think it’s not too bad!

The only thing i can’t get to work is to map the buttons to a MIDI command in Ableton. That’s something that i’ll have to figure out in the future.
/edit: Turns out it’s pretty easy. Instead of using a Max button, use a live.text object and in the inspector set the mode to “Button” and encase the label in quotes (so this -> “). A live.text object can be mapped to MIDI!

In case you’re wondering, i use the first 3 tracks and fill them with empty tracks in the form of numbers to show me the key of everything under that (it’s easy to read on my Launchpad). I use Rapid Evolution to key each track to make sure i never play songs out of key. I also color each track to the appropriate key-color. In case you are not familiar with mixing with keys, i suggest you read up on them, it changed the way i DJ dramatically!

It’s inspired by the tutorials created by Tom Cosm. Be sure to check out his site!

I’ll explain how i created the sound using Operator and a simple Reverb.
Step 1 to 4 are important, the rest after that is just to tweak the sound a little.

Step 1:
Create a MIDI track, throw in Operator and create a new MIDI clip with one tone stretched out across the entire clip (i chose an 8-bar clip with a C3 note).

Step 2:
Operators settings are actually pretty simple, i just enabled oscillators A&B (you actually just need to use A, but B gives that extra kick to it) and detuned B slightly.
Set them to a waveform of your choice (i chose Saw D), you can experiment with different settings and see how they sound.
I didn’t do anything to the envelop or the other settings so leave them as is.
On the algorithm panel (right bottom tab), set the algorithm to all separate (so all next to each other instead of on top of each other) and max out the pitchbend setting (you’ll see why in a moment).
The other settings you see that are on i’ll get to in a moment.

Step 3:
Go into the clipview and enable the envelop view (bottom left little “E” button).
Now click the “Pitch Bend” button on the newly opened window.
You now see a line in the clipview which is set to 0 all the way across.
This line actually corresponds with the pitchbend setting in Operator. When you set that setting to 24 semitones, the bottom of that window will pitch down the note 24 semitones and the top will pitch up 24 semitones. So let’s automate it so that it’ll start low and go up.
Double click on the line to create an automation point and put it in the bottom-left corner. Now double click on the line again (somewhere near the end) and drag the point to the top-right corner (but make sure you’re not putting it outside of the cliplength!) and play the clip.

Step 4:
So, that’s a pretty simple tone going from low till high. Pretty cool, but nothing too spectacular. So, let’s add a little “wow”-factor to the sound. Go back to Operator and enable the LFO setting. (Make sure the LFO destination is set to output to A&B, but it should be like that by default).
The LFO is basically just another oscillator, but at a much lower frequency which controls the pitch of the note going into the sound oscillators. To put it simply: what you just did with the pitchenvelop, it does that automatically.
Play the clip and experiment with the settings a bit, you’ll notice the sound will “wobble”. We’ll also automate that, but that needs to be done in trackview. We’ll make the frequency and the amount go up from start till finish. (Look at the automation image a few steps down to see what i did, just experiment a bit)

Step 5:
Now the sound we want is roughly done, but it needs to be a bit refined so it won’t kick in that hard and the build-up will be even more euphoric.
Enable the filter on Operator and just leave the settings as they are.
Now play the sound and jiggle around with the frequency setting of the sound to hear what it’s doing. Now automate this too, from low to high, so it’ll come in low and quiet and build up to a full-on sound with a kick. (Again, see below for the automation settings i used)

Step 6:
Automate the mixer, again for the same reason as step 5. Just make it come in a little bit light and build up to 0db.

Here are my automation settings:

You’ll notice that i also added a reverb. This is to prevent the sound from suddenly stopping when the end of it is reached. Just throw it in the same channel as Operator and look at my settings (stock settings, just switched the input-processing), the rest is automated.

To end this tutorial (if you would call it that), the important message i want to send here is: experiment! Tweak every knob you see and listen to what it does. It’s fun to create your own sounds!
Oh, if you’d like the Ableton project file for this sound, just comment on this post.

My collection is now complete!

First of, the heart of it all: MacBook Pro 17″ 2.8GHz C2D running Ableton 8 Suite with Max for Life

The heart of all audio routing and my main DJ tool: Allen&Heath Xone:4D

The main clip launcher tool and my inspritation for buying Max for Live: Novation Launchpad

My midi keyboard/controller: M-Audio Axiom 25

And last but not least, the very versatile TouchOSC running on my iPad.

All of this together (plus even more stuff) makes up my production booth at home.

Excuse the quality of the pics, made them in a kinda dark room with an iPhone4…

So, how did i do it? I’ll take you through it, step by step.

Step 1: Create a new Max Audio Effect

Step 2: Open the patch by clicking the edit button and behold: an empty audio effect

Step 3: Add a Live dial control (press the cross at the bottom of the patch window and select live.dial)

Step 4: Add other objects (an ‘object’ and an ‘live.numbox’, but that last one is optional), set the object command to: ‘dbtoa’ and connect them.
The command dbtoa converts a decibel input to a linear-amplitude which we can use to alter the audio signal with. (So 0dB = 1 (no change), -3dB = (about) 0.71, etc…)
The numbox is just there to see what the current gain dB setting converts to, it isn’t necessary.

Step 5: Open up the object inspector for the dial (rightclick on the dial, click Inspector) and set the dial up as follows.  This makes it a decibel dial and gives it a range of -20dB to +20dB.

Step 6: Add 2 objects and give them the command ‘*~’ (asterisk tilde), and connect them in between the audio lines. Finally, connect the second input to the dbtoa object.
The asterisk operator (command) is the multiplication command. Simply put, the command multiplies input 1 with input 2. Now you can see why a linear amplitude is useful, because if we had input 0 dB, the output would be 0.

There you go, a working gain patch. Just lock the patch with the little padlock at the bottom of the window and off you go!
There are 2 basic signal paths in this patch, the first one is the audio path, which just goes from ‘plugin’ via the multiplier to ‘plugout’.
The other goes from the gain dial to the ‘dbtoa’ command, which converts it to a lineair amplitude which we then can use as an input for the multiplier.

I know this may seem very simple (for an experienced Max developer) or very hard (for someone who doesn’t have any experience with programming or musicdevelopment), but i can’t really explain it any more without going into the details of both programming and audiomanipulation techniques. This is my first Max patch and without any experience with Max in the past, i think it’s a great introduction to the Max for Live platform!

If you have any questions regarding this patch, please don’t hesitate to comment below.

It will basically document me learning the world of music production in Ableton Live and Max for Live.
I’ve used Ableton for a long time now, but only for live DJ sets. And while this is a GREAT tool for DJing, it’s only scratching the surface of the possibilities of Ableton.

So a couple of days ago, i’ve decided to upgrade from the standard Live version to the Suite and i also bought Max for Live.
As i don’t have any experience with synths, or Max it’ll take me some time to learn how to use these tools properly. This is exactly what i’ll post here on this blog. I’ll show and play you some of the stuff i make and i’ll also fill you in on the stuff that i’ve learned and more importantly: the problems that i’ve had.
Every now and then i’ll also fill you in on my DJ-sets posted online and events i will be playing at.

The hardware i use is:

• MacBook Pro 17″ (2.8Ghz C2D, 4GBs of mem)
• Allen&Heath Xone:4D mixer
• Novation Launchpad
• M-Audio Axiom 25
• iPad with TouchOSC and LiveControl

I’ll post some pics of these tomorrow.

That’s it for now, see you next post!