Category: Tutorials

Comping during recording (with Logic)

When recording something that requires a lot of takes, like a lead vocal part, you’ll want to do what’s called “comping” to really get good results.

What does “comping” mean?
This is where you can make a composite take of multiple takes in a recording. Ever see a photographer take multiple shots and say they’ll just photoshop in the good smiles into one shot? That’s kind of what comping does for a vocal part.

Isn’t that kind of like cheating?
Absolutely.

But…
So anyway, let me move on and show you how to do comping in Logic!

How to comp in Logic
One thing that I’ve always been afraid of, due to how the tape metaphor often plays out in recording software, is recording over what I’m getting. I would hate to lose the perfect take by recording over it. However, to comp you must allow yourself to record over your parts.

In Logic’s arrangement view, it assumes you’ll want to comp, so when you record over a part, it simply replaces the old sound with the new sound but keeps it “underneath”. You can actually fan these takes out with the little arrow on the top left of the region. Here’s where the fun part begins.

Once the takes are all fanned out, you can just drag over the parts you want, and that will now be the “active part” of the composite take. For instance, let’s say the singer nails the first word of the chorus, but on the second take the rest of it was better. I can drag over that first word on the first take, and then drag over the rest of the second take and those two ideal parts now make up the final sound on the track. When I’m done, I can close the takes with the same little triangle and forget all about that part for now.

This makes doing multiple takes super easy, and can make your vocals sound a LOT more professional!

Monitoring Digitally II: video examples

Here’s a little example of the kinds of delay you might experience with a digital interface, and how to get rid of it.


Monitoring in the LHS studio

Since the Alesis interfaces are more complex, they have that monitoring program – most smaller interfaces don’t have any such program or advanced routing (but they do have the “computer vs. source knob”).

I hope you find this helpful! The tricky part is remembering to do this when you have 16 mics hooked up and are trying to record drums and guitar at the same time during a session. The tendency is to just listen to it through your DAW program, but if you want good monitoring, the players need to be listening to the source knob.

Again, you can probably guess this if you play guitar, that any software effects won’t get heard this way.

You have to explain the trade offs to the guitarists, and make sure everyone is comfy with the arrangement before recording (or else people get all touchy and clammed up about playing, which makes for a really bad session).

Tutorial: Creating a Breakbeat-style song in Ableton Live

The Breakbeat style
is a form of electronic music that gained popularity in the mid 1990s. It’s main characteristics include liberal use of a sampled beat which was usually derived from the drum solo of a 70’s funk song. This beat is cut into many permutations, and is combined with a wide array of other samples, guitar clips, and original synth parts. This lesson plan includes some examples for listening at the end.

Here’s a video version of the lesson that follows:

Step one: Crate Digging
The first thing any good breakbeat artist would do is go digging for samples. I have my students pick 2-3 songs from which they will take the solo drum breaks. I provide a large selection of funk tracks from my personal library. One place to start when finding these might be a CD from the popular funk collection “Ultimate Breaks and Beats,” which was compiled mainly for the purpose of finding good drum breaks to sample for early hip-hop music. A nice side effect of this part of the lesson is that students get what might be their only direct contact with funk music of that era.

Step two: Isolating and retooling the beats
Using Ableton Live, drag one of the tracks into a clip slot. I’m going to use an Amy Winehouse track with a great drum intro for my break. Live tries to figure out the correct beats per minute, but isn’t always right. We’ll have to use Ableton Live’s beat markers to demarcate four bars of this beat. You can take the time to mark the beginning as measure one, but it really doesn’t matter which measure numbers the beat starts with. I’ve turned on “Loop” and set the loop length to four bars.

After you have the loop running well, take the global tempo of the song (in the upper left corner) and crank it up to the 170s or 180s. This is a standard tempo range for this style of music. Also, in the Clip Panel, take the transposition (Transp) to +3 or +4, and boost the volume. Adding an effect like a compressor or limiter might be good too.

By now, your funk drum break should sound much more techno-like.

Step three: Divide the beat into distinct levels of complexity, and different effects on an A/B

Ableton Live’s session view uses a column-style for different instrument tracks, each of which is divided into rows called “scenes”. I like to think of each scene as a different section of the song, and I usually arrange from top to bottom in order of complexity.

Duplicate the drum track you already made, and set the first track to A and the second track to B. I have my students use the MIDI button in the upper right to assign the Mod wheel on their keyboards to the crossfader (located underneath the rightmost “master” track). This will allow easy switching between these two tracks for varied drum beats.

I like one of the drum tracks to sound fat and boomy, and the other to sound dry, chopped, and gated. Some fat and boomy effects include: delay, compressor, or reverb. Some dry sounding effects include: hi-pass filter, gate, beat repeat, bitcrusher, and flanger.

Now it is the students’ job to come up with some interesting variations for each track. I require at least three different reworkings of the clip per track whether it is a re-chopped version of the clip or a version of the clip with effects on it.

Step four: Add guitar licks
Now that the drums are pumpin’, let’s find a good guitar lick. I recommend finding some really obscure isolated guitar part, and juicing it with effects into a third track. The main idea is to get the guitar to sound more like a synth part by the time you’re done with it. I like using grungy sounding licks from bands like Nirvana, The White Stripes, or any other heavy guitar lick you can find.

I would suggest two tracks of guitar; one for a repeating rhythm, and another for interesting “one-shots”

Step five: Add synth bass and supporting kick bass
Tracks five and six will be for synthetic instruments, mainly a bass or pad for underlying harmonic structure, and an electronic kit to provide extra punch and drive to the drum track.

I let students be more individual with this part, as the basic song works already for performance and these are really the sounds that will define their taste for this song.

One neat trick for getting a great sounding techno bass is to have one track with a dry kick drum part, and another track with an extremely low bass note effected with a limiter to take the volume level up. This will get that club-style thumping sound so familiar in all kinds of electronic music.

Step six: Season to taste and perform

Ableton Live can be used as a sequencer, but for this project I find it more exciting and effective to have the students perform their songs. Hit the global record button at the top, and start live-triggering your clips. Use the crossfader we assigned to the Mod wheel to flip between A and B drum parts, and go through the different sections of your song.

I tell students during this phase of the project to be doubly sure that none of the level meters are peaking to red, and if they can’t hear them after turning them down, to add a compressor to the master track or simply spend a little time mixing the levels of all the tracks to a comfortable listening level.

I set a time requirement of about 2-3 minutes for this project, and most students will have gotten through all of their material and ideas by that time.

It’s also not a bad idea to listen to some Breakbeat artists while doing this project. I’d suggest Roni Size/Reprazent, The Prodigy (older stuff), Photek, and the Breakbeat Massive series.

Voila!
You have successfully recreated the Breakbeat style, and are ready to bust out the glowsticks and rave until the sun comes up. Please add any thoughts/comments below.

Recording on an iPad using a REAL microphone

This is less of a tutorial and more of a public service announcement. You can record using REAL microphones using your iPad and an M-Audio Fast Track.

Here are the steps:

First, you’ll need the iPad camera connection kit, a $29 accessory that comes with two pieces. One is for reading SD cards, the other is a plain USB port. Both attach to the dock port at the bottom of the iPad. Many people have discovered that the plain USB connector seems to support much more than cameras, and USB microphones is among those undocumented features.

As long as the USB audio device is class-compliant (meaning it doesn’t require custom drivers on Mac OS X), it should work, so I thought I’d try this out with my Fast Track. And guess what? It works!

I attached the camera connector to the iPad, plugged the Fast Track in. Sometimes, the iPad will reject the device, saying it’s not supported, but usually after a couple tries the Fast Track will light up and take over the audio system of the iPad.

I say “take over” because there is no Audio preference panel. There is no system-wide setting that routes audio as there is on a desktop OS. Instead, when the Fast Track is connected, all audio is routed to and from it (unless the app is written in such a way that it is ignored – most apps will recognize it). This means you’ll have to plug your headphones into the Fast Track rather than the iPad.

I tested mine using a stock Shure SM58, and it worked beautifully. I have not tried connecting a condenser mic, and will update this post when/if I get a chance. I’m fairly positive any USB audio device (as long as it’s class-compliant) will work using this method. The only exception is when a device draws too much power. The iPad will simply refuse to connect to a USB device that is drawing more than a small amount of power. I suspect that devices with phantom power (+48V) output will need to be tethered to an external power source before connecting to the iPad to make them work.

I tested this using Retronym’s Recorder app, a simple recorder written for the iPhone. Many audio apps are being updated as of this writing to support the USB audio feature of the camera kit.

Happy field recording!

Making a hardcore video wall using Quartz Composer

QUARTZ COMPOSER, WHERE DO YOU BUY THAT?
Quartz Composer, originally known as “Pixelshox Studio”, is 100% FREE. If you own a Mac, you already have Quartz Composer, but it likely isn’t installed. Insert your latest system disc and there should be an “optional installs” icon. This will install all of the developer tools, including XCode, iPhone Simulator and soforth. Don’t worry, it’s worth it.

THE PATCHER
If you’re familiar with other patchers like Max/MSP or PureData, this will look somewhat familiar. The main difference in the QC patcher is that patches tend to flow from left to right rather than from top to bottom. Also, “macros” or sub-patches are far more commonly used in QC than in the other aforementioned programs.

Fig. 1: A blank Quartz Composer window (left) and view (right)

ADDING THE INPUTS
Click on “Patch Library”. This brings up a palette with all of the available patches. Type “video” into the search box and double-click “video input”.

This adds a video input patch. This object does nothing yet – it’s an “input” with nothing to “output” to.

OUTPUTS
Now, we make an output. In the patch library find “Billboard”. This is a 2D object layer that has whatever you want “printed” on it. Hook the “image” output of Video Input into the “image” input of Billboard. It should look like this:

Fig. 2: One video input hooked to an output.

MAKING THE 4-SQUARE
Now all you need to do is copy the input/output objects. The only other step is to manually set the video device to use. You do this by selecting “Video Input” and clicking “Inspector”. Change to the “settings” tab and select the input device.

AN ASIDE ABOUT FIREWIRE VIDEO INPUTS
Only two simultaneous FW video inputs are allowed in Mac OS X. I’m not sure how many USB inputs are allowed but I got away with using the Built-in iSight off the iMac running the patch to create two of the four panels. One is zoomed in on the left side and the other zoomed in on the right, creating the illusion of two discrete video feeds.

Finally, check out the source file of my Quartz Composer patch – the video inputs will not work (unless you have the same exact cameras hooked up that I did) but it should be educational nonetheless.