Station Point

Crafting Tune Artifacts

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 […]

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 […]