Today’s Ableton tutorial is all about finding or creating inspiration on those days when writer’s block is kicking your ass.  Anyone that writes music on a regular basis is going to run into this problem once in a while, but for working professionals, simply choosing not to write isn’t always an option.

If you have a looming deadline for writing a little theme song or doing a small piece of sound design, it’s easy to forget that (for better or for worse) modern digital music production tools can even start our songs for us.

Randomizer & Scale: Two peas in a pod

If you use Ableton Live, there are some handy tools to do just that, and today I want to cover some extremely basic yet effective uses for two of them:  Randomizer and Scale.

I know some people are going to object passionately to the idea of using a tool to generate melodic ideas out of thin air.  However, I have no desire to turn this into an exhaustive, academic discussion about whether the machines have indeed taken over ala “Terminator”, so please keep your comments on track with creative or technical suggestions.

In the following video, I show you how to turn a simple rhythm that never deviates from a single pitch into multiple melodic ideas as well as recording this randomness so that you can further revise the resulting MIDI phrases:

Visual Chaos In The Arrangement

Today’s Ableton Live tutorial is all about keeping your arrange view neat and uncluttered.  After moving, splitting, and rearranging clips on the timeline, it can start looking pretty messy.  This gets especially bad when you’ve shifted the start point of a clip to overlap either the start or end of a natural loop or phrase.

While this messiness is OK while you experiment with changing the phrase, when it comes time to start laying out the structure of the entire track a messy arrangement view can wreak havoc with your organization, leading to mistakes in copying clips and notes to other parts of the song.  Since arrangement is generally agreed upon to be the most challenging part of completing a track, why make it harder on yourself than it needs to be?

For instance, if you try to copy a clip that doesn’t start at an easily identifiable beginning of a phrase, there’s a good chance you might accidentally paste that clip at the wrong start position in what is supposed to be an identical phrase further on in the composition.

The Same Arrangement, Cleaned Up Considerably

All of these mistakes are even easier to make when you’re zoomed out and looking at your piece from a bird’s eye perspective.  From here, any mistakes you make in selecting ranges in the timeline will be an order of magnitude harder to identify.  If you take the time to visually organize the chaos that you created during a rush of creativity with the simple “consolidate” command that I illustrate in the video below, your arrangement will be much easier to pull off successfully.

Asplosions!

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Shaun from Dynamic Interference about his new sound design challenge.  As far as I can tell, this is the first such challenge that Shaun has offered; it centers around footage of the old Texas Stadium being demolished, and the challenge is of course to add some effective sounds to the video.

The crux of the project will be explosions, but Shaun has thrown a bit of a curveball into the challenge:  The entries may not use time- or pitch-domain processing.  That means that it won’t be sufficient to simply grab two or three of your favorite explosion sounds, repitching and stretching them to form distinct events.

As I said to Shaun in our email conversation, disallowing this kind of processing, normally the meat and potatoes of a sound designer’s arsenal, is really going to hit the entrants where it hurts.  As a result, they will have to find creative ways to create a sonic narrative without these obvious standbys.

I think challenges like this are essential to driving the craft forward, so if you have any interest whatsoever in sound design for film, I urge you to head on over to the Sound Design Challenge and register!  By the way, the winner will get a cool prize, but I’ll let you read all about that in Shaun’s post.

Here, I've chopped out a portion of the original audio and created layers on new audio tracks.

Resampling is an incredibly simple yet powerful technique in digital music production.  The idea is straighforward:  Record the output of one or multiple tracks into a new, editable audio file.  It’s not much different than rendering your composition, except here you’re actually going to incorporate the new file into the current song.

I employ this technique often, dropping the resampled audio onto a new track and chopping, mangling, retuning and layering it until it’s barely recognizable.  This simple technique can pay dividends in terms of thickening sounds and giving you unexpected new directions for your composition.

As I say in the video, this technique is the crux of what hip-hop producers have been doing for a long time, so there’s no reason why people working in different genres can’t learn from this approach (If you’re interested, I have a 2 hour long Sampling and Slicing series which goes into sample layering and mangling).

In addition to giving rise to new composition techniques, resampling is a great way to force yourself to commit to your song rather then endlessly tweaking the MIDI notes and arrangement.

When you drop everything to audio, it may become easier to move forward and get the damn thing finished!  The visual clutter of a complex MIDI arrangement can sap a composer’s motivation, while a simple waveform presents the user with a manageable set of information.

Here’s a brief rundown of resampling and its uses in Ableton Live:

When you’re programming drum lines, one of the easiest and most effective things you can do is add velocity automation.  These subtle changes in velocity can take an otherwise bland loop and add a more organic feel.  If you combine this with editing your note triggers off the grid, you’ve got a simple recipe for extremely effective rhythm creation.

Unfortunately, editing individual velocity values can get pretty tedious so it makes sense to do anything in your power to simplify and speed up the process.  One oft-overlooked feature of Ableton Live is the ability to automatically demo different velocity values without the need to continually trigger the note manually from the sequencer or your keyboard.

At first glance this might seem really lazy, but after you’ve been slaving over a composition for a couple hours you begin to appreciate anything that lets you avoid unnecessary movement.

All you need to do is hold the mouse button down on a velocity value in the editor and drag up and down and Live will play back what each value will sound like in the final loop.

The following short and sweet video shows this functionality in practice:

Ableton Live is a simple-looking tool on its face, presenting only the essential functions in an explicit way.  However, if you dig a little deeper you’ll find all sorts of clever functionality that can make your music production life a whole lot easier.

While these things might not seem that special to people who are used to more traditional DAWs where there are lots of functions spread across numerous floating toolbars, those of us who are addicted to Live’s minimalist interface still need the ability to carry out more advanced editing features when it comes time to put the final polish on a track.

In this Ableton tutorial video, I cover some basic concepts related to recording and editing automation curves in Live.  Some of these functions will be obvious to the majority of users, but I suspect at least one or two of them might will be new to many of you, especially the newcomers to Live.

At the very least, this video will serve as a no fluff crash course on automation in Live for you veterans who might be set in your ways and looking to learn some new tricks:

Automation in Ableton Live:

Kris Giampa, sound designer at Blizzard by day and electronic music composer/label owner by night, has started a new blog which focuses on music for video games.  Like many people, I am a rabid fan of Blizzard’s past catalogue (when Diablo III comes out, I am officially checking out of life for a week).  I’m really looking forward to reading what Kris has to say about game sound.  Here’s a quote from his first post that will no doubt ring true for any one working in game audio right now:

“In short, doing sound design for video games is a different beast than doing sound for film or tv. While the main principles of the sound design itself can carry over from film and tv, where it differs is in how you must think about how it will trigger back in the game real time. This split of being not only artistic as well as technically savvy is where I really enjoy my job.”

When I sit down to work on a synth patch or a piece of music, I’m only dealing with a linear timeline.  In modern game sound design, on the other hand, the focus shifts to figuring out how to bring the various components of a particular sound together in a way that is dynamic enough to change with all the variables present in the game engine.  To say that this is a challenging task is a gross understatement!

I hope that over time Kris’ blog will give out some insights on the various challenges of working in an audio medium where implementation is as important as design.  Having never worked in the industry, I’m fascinated by even the basic aspects of audio middleware and the possibilities that it brings to the game development table.

Mark Mosher from Modulate This! has been posting up some fun and educational one off experiments with synth patches which are aimed at “one patch performances.”  This means that only one instance of a particular synth is used with a healthy bit of automation to play out a complex song or sequence over time.

Operator seems to be ideal for this type of patch as a result of its sophisticated oscillator routing architecture, allowing you to potentially have 4 different sound generators playing complex patterns on top of one another.

Additionally, you can choose to route oscillators to one another at the expense of unique voice playback. For instance, you might set oscillator D to modulate C, and then output only the audio of C.  If you do something similar with B modulating A, then you could create two complex, frequency modulated voices playing back independently.  A concrete example might include dedicating one pair of oscillators to a high hat sound and the other pair to a kick drum.

the loop setting in Operator

The easiest way to accomplish separate looping patterns for each oscillator in Operator is by utilizing the “Loop” drop down in the lower left corner of each oscillator’s detail screen.  There are a number of different ways you can set this up, either looping every x milliseconds or at tempo sync’ed beat intervals.  Most people will want to opt for the “Beat” setting which allows the repeats to be measured in predictable intervals.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ve covered this stuff in depth in my Ableton Operator series as well, including an in depth look at creating one patch performances (to borrow Mark’s phrase).

Here’s the video demonstrating Mark’s patch:

Be sure to head over to Mark’s post and leave a comment if you enjoy the video.  He’s doing a whole series on these one patch performances; this is information that will be especially useful to readers who are looking for neat ways to make their live performances more dynamic.

Remember Impulse?  I know there are plenty of people who rightfully swear by it, but there are many more new Live users who purchased the program well after the introduction of the newer stuff like Drum Racks, Sampler, etc., who just haven’t had the time or inclination to dig into the older devices.

Impulse has become somewhat of a hidden gem in Live, capable of some mind-bending timestretch effects which are perfect for drums and ambient sounds.

Also, keep in mind that there’s nothing stopping you from combining Impulse with the Drum/Instrument Rack devices, for instance. If you take this a step further, you can even create a default device preset for the Drum Rack where it loads up Impulse devices into its cells, allowing you to create an organized matrix of Impulses. If you’d like to see a tutorial on this, let me know in the comments section.

In this video, I go over a couple basic things to whet your appetite, including practical advice on playing an Ableton device with the computer keyboard (with velocity!), local and global time stretching and transposition in Impulse, and adding a dash of randomness to the pitch of your drum sounds to keep things sounding more organic than static sample playback would normally allow:

Another great sound designer interview is up courtesy of my friend Miguel at Designing Sound.  This time around, he interviews the sound design geniuses behind the game “Singularity,” a moody FPS that I’ve had the pleasure of putting some time into over the last week or so.

I’m floored at how much game sound design has improved over the last couple of years, but in this post I wanted to focus on what musical sound designers can learn from these guys.

Here’s my favorite quote from the interview:

“I don’t like to follow the most obvious path, particularly when designing sci-fi themed sounds for a game with as much possibility as Singularity. For example, when making sound for a futuristic rocket, going into a sound library and entering the word “rocket” into the search field isn’t a good enough starting point. Instead, just having a clear impression about the desired sound, such as the texture of it, points me in some interesting directions to go in. I might end up grabbing the sound of a rolling skateboard and a crying baby for a flying rocket if there seems to be a connection between those elements and the envisioned rocket sound. Sometimes I’ll grab some really weird stuff without forethought just to get the ideas going but the best work results from having a sense for what the sound should be. Forethought helps illuminate more interesting and original creative directions.”

This is a concept that I’ve tried to get across in one form or another many times in the tutorials and here on the blog.  I firmly believe that sound designers benefit more from an intimate familiarity with the concept of timbre than they do from having the most comprehensive sound library in the world, and this goes equally for people working in music as it does for those working in games and film.

If you truly want a unique take on a familiar sound, break that sound down into its individual timbral elements.  Do you absolutely have to use that bangin’ kick drum sample from the same library that everyone has been recommending on the Dubstep forum for the last 2 years?  Why not think about the individual parts of a kick drum sound, i.e. what makes it sound distinct?

Now you realize that the kick has a “click” in the high end and a big, rumbly “body” on the low end.  By breaking it down into these component parts, you realize that just about anything could perform these roles.  For example, there’s nothing stopping you from recording yourself kicking a ball and modulating the result to use as the body of your kick.

I’ve run into (often bitter) backlash against this way of thinking because people want the fastest, easiest solution to everything.  Addressing that complaint is getting tiring for me, so I’ll leave it at this:  Don’t try to do all of your sound design and write your track at the same time. This is a recipe for failure, and it’s an easy trap to fall into.  Most of the time, you’re just going to run out of inspiration before you can get the basic idea into your sequencer because you spent too much time tweaking knobs.

Next time you are looking for that perfect sample or synth patch, see if you can challenge yourself to break down your desired sound into its timbral components, and get creative with building them up in a unique way.