FX Halos in Ableton Live
This is a very simple trick to do, but not so obvious to figure out that it’s even possible. The idea is to sidechain compress the processing on a Return bus by its own input signal, in order to clear out some “empty” space around the dry signal. It’s like making a “breathing fx bus”. For […]
MiniCommand, Machinedrum, and OS X
So I’ve had a Ruin & Wesen MiniCommand for a little under a year, but haven’t been using it as much as I would like because it didn’t integrate well with my setup — until last night. The standard way to use the MiniCommand is to connect it in a closed MIDI loop with the device […]
Alien Autopsy Via Sample-Rate Reduction
Here’s a cool sound-design trick. If you want to get a vocal-sounding ‘formant filter’ effect out of a synth that only has a normal lowpass filter, you can take advantage of a quirk of sample-rate reduction effects to generate multiple “mirrored” filter sweeps through the wonder of aliasing. Here’s a sound clip from my machinedrum […]
Wake Up Tech EP
Out now on Beatport, Wake Up Tech features three original tracks and two dancefloor-friendly remixes by Pointbender (Sean Anderson) and Gift Culture (Michael Hale). This EP was released under my tech-house alias ‘Chakaharta’. Alembé Superbroken Superbroken (Pointbender’s Superbender Mix) Superbroken (Gift Culture’s Psytech Mix) Jazzstab Album artwork by Jamie Cameron Northrup. Available for Download on Beatport. Please pass […]
Ableton Live, The Machinedrum and The Monomachine (Part 2): Minimizing Latency
In Part one of this series, I posted tips for getting the Monomachine and Machinedrum synced and recording properly with your Live sessions. The other half of the equation is which operations to avoid that might introduce latency and timing errors during your sessions. Ableton Prints Recordings Where It Thinks You Heard Them I guess this […]
Ableton Live, The Machinedrum and The Monomachine: Midi Sync Notes
Recently I’ve been (going crazy) getting the timing tight between Ableton and two outboard sequencers — the Elektron Monomachine and Machinedrum. On their own, these silver boxes have amazingly tight timing. They can sync to each other to create a great live setup. Add a computer DAW into the loop, and you introduce jitter, latency, and […]
How To: Algorithmic Music with Ruby, Reaktor, and OSC
The basic idea is to use a simple OSC library available for Ruby to code interesting music, and have Native Instruments’ Reaktor serve as the sound engine. Tadayoshi Funaba has an excellent site including all sorts of interesting Ruby modules. I grabbed the osc.rb module and had fun with it. I’m giving a brief presentation at the Bay […]
Machinedrum Recursive Sampling Test 02
So this is another example of using the MD’s internal sampler to create a recursive “feedback loop” of sampling and resampling and resampling.… This has a tendency of psychedelically twisting the underlying beat. The way this stuff sounds has really surpassed my wildest dreams. MD Recurse Test 02
Machinedrum Recursive Sampling Test 01
This was a first test at using the Machinedrum’s internal sampler recursively. I was trying to emulate my fractal wavetables sounds in hardware, as closely as the MD could do it.
Cool Tricks For Better Mixes
I recently slugged through mixdown on my track Super Broken and found the following 5 tips invaluable: 1. Mono Is Awesome I’ve heard this one a million times, but never actually tried it. This article does a great job describing the hows and whys: The Secret Benefits To Mixing In Mono. Among other great insights — […]
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