It’s a great privilege to be involved with participatory youth program called QUADwrangle over the next two weeks. I’m working with a bunch of young sound artists from the College of the Arts (VCA), to create an interactive sound sculpture that will reside at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax theatre August 13-16.
The intention is to create an immersive and fun piece with this awesome crew of artists and musicians. We’re going to explore new processes together, and develop a work that will invite and engage the audience to get involved an collaborate with one another to make music.
All too often these sort of interactive works run the risk of having too much happening when lots of people are interacting with it. The challenge for us is going to be to get this sculpture to become more musical, more harmonious and more inviting the more people who are playing with it.
These themes are intended to mirror Shaun Parker’s The Yard, a contemporary dance piece that is running concurrently at the Fairfax theatre, which tackles the cultural divide within the school yard.
Today we spent the day creating original sounds, that evoke a school yard of nostalgia of sampling old primary school xylophones into my Teenage Engineering OP-1, creating Drum Racks of clunking rulers, tearing paper and textas, as well as manipulating field recordings into soundscapes within Ableton live.
Rehearsals have begun for a fantastic project I’m involved with called The Radio Hour. It is part of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival inconjunction with ABC Radio National.
This is a full scale live production – a night of non-fiction story-telling on the theme ‘When Words Fail’, presented live on stage by the writer/s/producers themselves, and scored live my some super-talented musicians. The night will be recorded live for broadcast on Radio National’s 360 Documentariesprogram.
I’m part of a band with Biddy Connor (Sailor Days, Laura Jean band) & Dan Marsh (Human Face) performing a live soundtrack.
This is the fifth instalment of my Music and Sounds project, where I give away free sounds and Ableton Live project files. This one contains two Ableton Drum Racks and two Convolution FX Racks that use samples of Rocks and Metals that I found when on holidays in The Grampians Mountain Ranges.
The *Metal* rack was created from a pile of rusty old tools I found by a shed, I hit, scraped and dropped various metals against other metals.
The *Rocks* were scraped, dropped and thrown to create thumps, clunks and clicks.
The samples themselves are pretty straight forward, but I hope that you’ll dig a little deeper inside the racks to see how it is all constructed so that when you start playing with the Macros, a whole different world of sounds can be created by some creative FX routings.
I’ve also played around a bit with samples within Max For Live’s Convolution reverb, to create some very strange, but evocative *convolution FX racks*
I was recently part of a remix/collaboration project with fellow Melbourne producer, and all-round nice guy Tim Shiel.
Tim recently made the soundtrack for a iOS game Duet, which has been kicking goals internationally.
He then invited a bunch of fellow Melbourne producers, Lower Spectrum, Friendships, Aoi, Jahnne, Aliigator Williams, Luke Howard, Surf Dad, Clue to Kalo and yours-truly, to take the musical elements of this iOS soundtrack, and re-interpret them.
Here is the track that I worked on with Tim called “Collapse”.
It’s ended up sort of like a dark expansive soundscape with a sense of internal perpetual movement that will hopefully take you on a musical journey.
I recently talked at one of the Ableton Live User Group meet-ups in Melbourne about how i’ve started the process of creating a new album. I plan to create a series of blog posts about this process as the album evolves, so this first part is all about the initial stage of how and why I choose certain tracks.
Being a long time devotee of the Beatles, I often have grandiose visions of creating a seamless album like the B side of Abbey Road, where each track flows into the next in an effortless and joyous montage. This is something that I first started to seriously try to do with my third album, which I released in 2011.
I’ve been thinking about putting together another release for some time, I originally wanted to do a short EP as a bit of a stopgap, partly because I didn’t think I had enough completed songs, and partly because I’m not sure I really want to go through the challenging and time consuming process of putting together a full album, promo campaign, and touring live show to support the album.
But I figured I should do some folder house-keeping and try and categorize all the half-finished, or even just loop ideas that I’ve been playing with and then saving and forgetting.
So, I opened every live set that I had created over the last two and a half years, and attempted to categorize them into newly created folders named:
Not much here, Cinema, Darkwave, Offhop, TV Sync, Weird doof, Remix, Atmospheric twinkles, The ultimate 80’s soundtrack & WP work more
Once I did this, I realized I had over 50 tracks that I could consider potential Winterpark tracks.
In terms of how I define what a Winterpark track is, and how that is different from one of those other categories… that’s a somewhat difficult thing for me to explain! I probably know more-so what is NOT a Winterpark track. They’re not overly dance, not overly dark in nature.
But to try and find the elements that they all seem to share; I guess the common thread for WP tracks are that they’ll generally have some processed guitar on them, they are melodic, hopefully uplifting and sonically cinematic.
So, with over 50 unfinished projects, I had to make some further decisions and categorizations, so I created folders called: Start, Middle, End, Interlude & Cannibalize these.
These were based purely on where I felt like each track could potentially go in an album sequence. Whether it had enough substance in it to ultimately be a finished track, whether it felt like something that could open an album, or whether it could close an album. If it felt like it was never going to be finished, I’d decide whether it had something in it that was worth cannibalizing, or perhaps create a short sonic interlude of the various elements that worked in it.
Due to my current hectic life, (work & young bub) only some of these tracks had some arrangement that had been half worked on, but most were simply session view clips… for these songs I’d create a down and dirty ‘vibe’ arrangement by arming an audio track to resample from, and just trigger clips or scenes as the case may be, do some on the fly volume mixing until I got something that sort of worked. I would do only one or two re-samplings like this per track, and chucked them in a new folder called “order mixes”.
I also bounced out any arrangements that I’d created, I didn’t really want to concentrate on ‘mixing’ or anything just yet, just getting the sound of the track, and hopefully a basic arrangement that showed off the different elements in the track, so I could see if they worked together and flowed as an album.
It’s sort of like sequencing the album before it’s finished. It informs me as to what tracks I need to work on and which ones I don’t, and also helps me decide what sort of intro or outro is needed for each track to transition seamlessly (hopefully!) to the next.
In the video below is the first part of my presentation at the Ableton Live User Group session, which is basically just me talking through what i’ve written about here.
I recently talked to a bunch of producers about vocal editing techniques at one of the Enable Music School sessions, and I thought I’d post a little something that I shared with them, and also expand a little more on some of the techniques I use.
As an example I’m using the final track on my Sunday Morning album, called Gotta Sleep Now.
It’s a pretty sparse track, with lots of atmospheric guitar loops, some synth bass, and features the wonderful vocals of Susannah Legge.
I’ve included a Live Set version of this as an instrumental track, with the original vocals, and with the vocals edited an processed, so you can listen to and see the techniques I’m writing about, but please note, that this live set, and the audio files within it are for your education only. If you get all inspired to take those files and make a remix of it, that is totally fine, just let me know! but I retain all rights to this music.
This is the vocal processing channel strip I have created. Whilst it may look a little bit overkill, it’s actually a pretty standard vocal strip, with low cut, noise gate, glue compressor, saturation, EQ, and some parallel FX with reverb and delay.
I’ve also created some Macro settings to dial in more or less of certain parts of the vocal sound.
I love breathy vocals, and I never want to fully get rid of the character it brings to a track, but once you’ve added some vocal FX, like Compression and Saturation, you’ll really start to notice that these Breaths and Esses in your vocal track sometimes get too loud.
The technique I use to deal with this is actually a pretty easy and quick workflow using Ableton Live. Firstly go “Off grid”, that is press CMD+4, and lose the snap to bar/beat feature, then highlight the region with the breath or ‘ess’ sound and press CMD+E, this will split that region in vocal performance into a new clip.
Go into that newly created clip and in the Sample section, lower the volume by between 4-10dB, depending on how loud the breath or ess is, and how much you want to get rid of it.
Once you have reduced the volume of that clip, open up the fades option, and cross-fade between the clips, this will give a smoother transition between the two different volumes.
To add a little extra zest and character to a vocal, I also like to automate the volume levels of a performance using a Utility plugin after the Vocal FX chain. In particular, I like to grab the ends of words, and bring them up just by a few dB. I find this adds to the intimacy in the vocal performance, and you feel like the singer is right in your ear.
By automating the gain of a Utility, as opposed to the channel fader, you have the ability to keep the fader adjustable later in the mix, whilst keeping your vocal volume automation intact.
So, I’ve been really busy with music over the last few months demoing and compiling new tracks to go on what was originally going to be a short 5 or 6 track EP… but then I got a bit carried away, and it looks like this collection of tracks is going to end up being another album 🙂
I actually really like the format of an album, perhaps this is because I grew up listening to LPs and Cassette tapes, where tracks always were in the same order… though I have to admit, sometimes the shuffle function on my iPod spits out some pretty amazing musical synchronicity!
Anyway… the fourth as yet un-named Winterpark album is currently taking shape, and I’m really happy with how it’s sounding so far… I’m looking towards a mid year release if all goes according to plan. In creating this new album, I’ve been experimenting with live looping and the creation of atmospheric textures from electric guitar.
This Ableton Instrument has been created from one of these Loops. The original guitar loop has a pitch-shifting reverb drenched sound, that classic Eno-esque ‘Bloom’ sound. When I transformed this into a sampler based instrument rack, I noticed that wherever you play it on the keyboard you can get some really interesting and diverse textures. I hope you enjoy it!
Here are a couple of Midi FX plugins that I created for the Enable Music Theory for Electronic Musicians session I presented at in December.
The idea is to have a series of Midi FX racks which allow you to use single key strokes or button pushes to create lush evolving chords.
With *Epic Chord Rack* you can switch between major and minor, and increase the harmonic overtones of either the Harmony, or Tonic notes in the chord, as well as control to tweak the Maximum velocity out, which can come in handy if you start pushing the velocity messages up too high.
*Note Remover* uses a trick of three velocity plugins in a row, with various settings to randomly remove the number of notes that the chord plugin splits out.The Macros give you the option to have either more or notes in the chord as well as an output velocity level.
*Re-Voice* basically ensures that all notes will always sit within about a two octave range, no matter what the incoming note message is. You can assign an octave range via the Macro.
*Racked Scale* is a couple of scale plugins conveniently grouped together and macro-mapped so you can change between Major and Minor Scale shape, transpose your scale anywhere within a two octave range, and change into any of the diatonic modes within a major or minor scale via the Base Macro.
If you have any further questions, feel free to write a reply and I’ll do my best to answer! and if you find this useful, and want to support the creation of these FX, please consider donating a dollar!
So I’m doing a presentation at Face the Music conference tomorrow… if you can’t make it.. this video is about 3 minutes of an hour and a half session that I’m doing with the very talented Tim Shiel, about incorporating Ableton Live and Music Tech…
