When we last joined our friend Gustavo Bravetti, Uruguay’s Ableton maestro, he was showing us how to glitch out with Live. Now he’s on Hong Kong-based DJ site djvox with a comprehensive set of Live tutorials. These are not necessarily the usual “how to use Live” fare. Instead, they focus on musical techniques, with Live as the tool — a means to an end, and a way to approach Live as an instrument, rather than a duplicate manual.

First up — one of my favorite tricks, which is building bass drum sounds in Operator. Not everyone loves Operator, but this is exactly why I like it for certain tasks: it’s a no-nonsense, quick way of building synths that drops nicely into a Drum Rack for quick DIY drum machines. And that pitch envelope and all-in-one time controls are especially handy.)

And for IDM lovers, here are some clever tricks for creating rhythmic variations using envelopes and follow actions. This one is especially worth a trip through the guide, even if you have different musical results in mind, because it’s an exceptional description of how follow actions work — one that’s actually better than the manual’s.

That gives you an idea of what Gustavo is working with, but be sure to check out the full guide for more details and step-by-step instructions, friendly even to beginners.

He even gives a shout out to the open-source 3D webcam MIDI controller for Windows we looked at last year.

Looking forward to more iProducer installments, Gustavo! And readers, now you know what to do with your evening / weekend / sick day you’re about to call in. Erm, if you’re not too busy building an arcade cabinet for Live first, that is.

iProducer: A Creativity Upgrade [Ableton Live tutorial on djvox]

(By the way, for digital crate-diggers: snooping around that Hong Kong site, you can buy downloads there internationally, though they wind up being a bit steep in US dollars.)

And the answer is … this real-time music production software is used for instantaneous sound effects and music clips needed in the fast-paced world of two popular game questions.

What is … Ableton Live?

Veteran sound pro Barbara Hagan describes to Ableton.com how she works with both programs:

Now I have two computers with Live; one is my main computer (new MacBook with 2.16 processor), and one is a back up (G4 PowerBook). I currently use Live on both computers, and I’m constantly busy building cues during two days of taping, six shows a day, on Wheel of Fortune, five a day for Jeopardy. I transfer new cues from CDs right into iTunes, then edit them in Live. I transfer info to my backups with flash drives and build folders for post production use every day we tape. I store everything, and back up three times everywhere. Guess I’ve ended up being the keeper of the music, safe and intact. Sometimes it’s pretty crazy, but mostly it’s fun. And it all started because of Live!

Now, music tool developers are regularly touting various “celebrity” users and pro applications for their product. But, of course, what makes this especially interesting is that Ableton Live was never designed to perform this task. It just happens that Live is the only general-purpose music software that tackles how to do live, real-time sound, not just as a plug-in but by baking what amounts to sampling features into the app itself. Years later, there’s been little response from anything else. It also demonstrates that certain general capabilities can have applications for users you haven’t thought of, particularly if there’s some fundamental utility to them (like triggering sounds easily).

Something to think about, not only in respect to Live, but if you’re building your own tools in programs like Max or even just working on tweaking your own live performance music setup.

Thanks, Marcel Ramagnano! Photo: xbeachy.

I think Hank Shocklee’s contribution to Public Enemy, as a producer and co-founder, had a deep influence on the approach to sampled sound and digital sound ever since. In Brisbane, Australia in December, I got to sit in a room full of students at the Art of Record Production conference and listen to Shocklee walk through the album "Fear of a Black Planet." I realized it was a bit like needle-dropping Sgt. Pepper with George Martin.

Shocklee describes his role with Public Enemy as a kind of teacher, helping Chuck D, poet, meet digital production technology. In the years since, he’s expanded that teaching role to include young people around the world, and he’s got some strong opinions about the importance of learning the craft of recording and music in general.

Fittingly, we sat down for a few moments in a classroom.

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. I - On music making from cdm tv on Vimeo.

What a lot of people may not know about Hank Shocklee is that beyond being a Public Enemy veteran, he’s also been deeply involved in the music industry. Unlike so many armchair industry quarterbacks, Shocklee has worked with the major artists (from Madonna to Peter Gabriel) and had a significant stint as Senior Vice President for Universal MCA Records. That means when Shocklee criticizes the industry as musically illiterate, he speaks from the perspective of someone who’s been on both the inside and outside of the majors. (He’s now producing and scoring music independently, and drove his entrepreneurial spirit into his own Shocklee Entertainment.)

Criticizing is one thing — but Shocklee had advice for how artists can guide the direction of their own career. He talks about the limitations of the industry, how the music community can grow beyond it, and how visual media could finally become a serious domain for musicians. (We agree with that.)

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. II - On music business from cdm tv on Vimeo.

If your musical production sense tends to gravitate towards the clicky, minimal, and weird, you will appreciate the results you can achieve with Ableton Live by employing a few well-placed tricks. Gustavo Bravetti–the Uruguay-based producer / DJ / maker / tinkerer / entrepreneur we interviewed last year–walks us through his process of glitching out Live with a few tweaks, namely some well-placed volume envelopes, using follow actions and legato and then adding swing to groove-ify the whole thing.

Ed.: Okay, this isn’t necessarily helping Live shake its reputation as just this — a wonderland for glitchers. You really can make stuff that isn’t glitchy in Live, and that new compressor and mix engine sound fantastic. But you still have to glitch it out every now and then. It’s good, clean (erm, digitally dirty) fun. 4-bit 4ever. -PK

VideoHelper, a sound production house, has a new library of sounds they call “narrative sound design,” a combination of “experimental” sound designs. You may have already heard some of the sounds from the two-disc collection, “Modules”, as the sounds have popped up in trailers for the likes of Spiderman 3, House of Wax, and Transformers. Since we love strange sound design techniques, though, I was just as interested in the techniques used to record the library, so I asked the boys of VideoHelper to share some of their favorite recording techniques. Sure enough, they’ve got some great examples — ones that might inspire you to go grab your mobile recorder and see what damage you can do.

Chris from VideoHelper searched his memory and mentioned these techniques, some of which even have subliminal political messages (hey, sound is powerful stuff). Some techniques you’ll no doubt know well (BANG THING! BANG THING RECORD WITH MIC! being one of my personal favorites to use), while others may be new. Chris writes that his favorite tips are:

1. Hitting and smashing everything. Mailboxes, dumpsters, whatever.
2. Homemade contact mics. $2 worth of parts from Radio Shack and some duct tape. They are piezo mics that can be wired to a 1/4” output and taped to an object.
3. Dry ice. We’ve bought dry ice and recorded the contact between it and metal cymbals and whatever else is laying around. Makes a squealing sound not unlike fresh sausage hitting a hot skillet.
4. Recording silence in acoustic spaces. I do this a lot…I’ll record in a big acoustic space (like a subway corridor) and use the files for ambient recordings/sound design. It’s cool b/c it’s not really silence, just nothing in the foreground…also I record at 96K so I get some really subtle sub-harmonic material.
5. Leave beats on my answering machine and re-record for a breakdown.
6. If I’m recording a trip-hop track around 100 bpm, I may record 3 half-steps slower, so I can re-pitch up to original tempo.
7. For my POLITIK score (SH02) I got to plunder our vaults of news music for sampling. The score is a political trip-hop score using some orchestral sounds, concrete elements, fair use bites etc. I used Bush’s 2000 ring modulated acceptance speech as an impulse/input (ala Paul Panhuysen) to a prefaded verb for the ambient element of the piece BIRTH OF A NOTION. I inter-cut Hilter speeches with the cheering from the 2004 RNC. Grabbed audio from protesters in Miami (anti FTAA) and cut up into rhythmic bits…did turntable cuts on police siren “records”. The last piece depicting 9/11 has design made of box-box recordings (CVR) which was difficult to listen to. ENERGY CRISIS has all sound to do with gasoline and auto maintenance. The piece AFGHANI HEROIN has concrete elements from the the floor of the NYSE, as well as Hamid Karzai’s acceptance speech.
8. Maybe my favorite: I have 1/4” blank audio tape that I buried in a graveyard in Sleepy Hollow over Halloween of 2003. The tape was washed and re-spooled and now I use it to lay off tracks to…also I recorded it back (blank) to a file so you can hear all the dents and pits and whatever other hallucinations you can find on it.
9. Oh and one more thing talking of acoustic spaces…Flavio and I got the opportunity to record in an empty water tower in my hometown of Hampton Bays (my father-in-law works for the water authority)…the tower was being filled that week but we got to crawl around in it while empty…

VideoHelper has full details on the Modules series, with searchable sounds and previews, at their website. The library includes “modular” cuts that can be edited into full designs, with individual and annual blanket licenses.

VideoHelper Music Production Library

Beatrix Jar is Bianca Pettis (Beatrix) and Jacob Aaron Roske (JAR). The duo teaches workshops on Circuit Bending and performs live with an eclectic set of gear including an AM radio, bent Speak ‘n Spells, drum machines and samplers.

I met up with them in Minneapolis last week to discuss their new album Golden Fuzz and their approach to musicmaking. They’re an enthusiastic twosome, finishing each other’s sentences and eager to illustrate their ideas by firing up a piece of gear and making some excellent sounds.

Golden Fuzz may be the most accurate album title I’ve seen all year. It’s a shimmering mosaic of beats and samples layered with a smattering of live vocals, samples, circuit-bent toys and AM interference. The tracks flow and build organically with a distinctly human element. A jazz-like approach and bent electronics interact with crisp beats and found samples in a way that tells a dreamlike story, impressionistic and a little funky. It’s a bold and refreshing approach to digital musicmaking, taking chances and letting elements of unpredictability and in-the-moment decisions guide the process along. This is a fun, lush album that draws from a wide and rich palette of sounds, and I recommend that you check it out.

They’ve got a great live/work space in a building populated entirely by artists, writers, dancers and the like. It happened to be Jacob’s birthday while I was in town and they invited me over to discuss art and music, and have some food, drink and an impromptu jam session.

CDM contributors Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una will be presenting at Dorkbot Chicago this month, which falls on Wednesday, November 28th.
As always, it will take place at the excellent Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave. in Chicago.

Here’s what you’ll see:

A self-proclaimed “multi-hyphenate,” Liz McLean Knight–the sole woman behind Quantazelle–is thoroughly immersed in technology, fashion, music, and the often-surprising overlaps between. She will be demonstrating and discussing the art of “micro-sampling” and other swell digital music production techniques. Once she gets going, this whole thing might turn into a dance party.

Michael Una, an audiovisual artist whose work “investigates how vibrating waves of energy and human consciousness interact” will present simple-but-effective techniques for controlling audio software and hardware with inexpensive, commonly found devices like QWERTY Keyboards, video game joysticks, and bicycles.

In addition to the knowledge we’ll be droppin’, beer and pizza will be served. W3rd.

We see all kinds of novel controllers and input devices for music on CDM, but don’t always get the chance to see how these are used in actual music making. Uraguay-based Gustavo Bravetti is a master of live laptop performance with alternative controllers. (See previous video of him from Colombia.) He talks to Liz (aka Quantazelle, a laptop virtuoso herself) about the scene on the other side of the Americas and how he’s able to fire up crowds with unusual performance techniques, via three-axis light control and the P5 interactive glove. And, really, we didn’t put him up to all the plugs for this site — I’m much more excited to find out how people are able to use some of these resources in front of an audience! So, Gustavo, we’re thrilled to learn about what you’re doing. Take it away, Liz. -PK

What’s the scene like in Montevideo / Uruguay? How does it compare to other locations? Is it conducive for you to work?

Uruguay is a very small country, we have just 4 million people, and the electronic scene is growing and getting smarter. I think that thanks to the internet, we are updated in what concerns to music and technology, we also are well informed on the global scene, that wouldn’t be possible without the invaluable tool that is the internet. Anyway, the Internet is a double sided weapon, and must be handled with care.

I’m a very positive person. I think that any scene is conductive for my work, especially in “your own city’s scene.” I mean, if they know you from the neighborhood, they will be harder to impress, and therefore will be more people that will criticize you, but if you take the good part of this, it would be positive for your work.

As the last couple of decades have led to making music in software, some of the materiality of physical instruments is lost. No matter how much you love your hardware synths, odds are you spent at least a little time looking into the void of a computer screen. And to the public, much of that is obscured by the back of a display. Instruments face outward; computers face inward.

Enter online photo sharing. Screen grabs can make software rigs visible. For example, someone’s been busy putting together a monster bass channel strip in Ableton Live:

Contained: the synth source is Vember Audio’s Surge digital synth, fed into Ohmforce’s Ohmicide saturator/distorter, Waves’ C4 (a multiband parametric compressor), L2 (ultramaximizer) and Maxx Bass (bass enhancement), and Ableton Live’s own Auto Filter and Saturator. Kids, don’t try this at home. I’m amused because this is hilarious, goes-to-eleven overkill.

Got some screen grabs you want to share? Add them (and anything else music-related) to the Create Digital Music Flickr pool, and drop us a line if you think we’ll find it especially interesting.

I’ll be interested to see if tools like plasq’s upcoming Mac utility Skitch also catch on for this purpose.

For field recording, sampling, recording practices and performances, video production, and a lot of other purposes, just about everyone wants an ideal digital mobile recorder. If you haven’t been following comments, we’ve had an extended discussion by readers on the Zoom H4 mobile recorder, its upcoming smaller sibling the H2, and competitive devices like Edirol’s R09.

Now, the excellent new blog bleeps has had some hands-on time with the H4 in movie production:
10 reasons a Zoom H4 is handy on a movie set!

Interestingly, the main issue other readers have had with the H4 — difficulty accessing mic level controls — wasn’t really a problem in this application. The basic internal stereo mics did just fine for stereo imaging. And there’s no shortage of uses:

• Recording primary on-location sound in stereo (even with the built-in mics, though the H4 also has XLRs)
• On-the-fly foley / sound effects
• Ambient audio, room tone, etc.
• On-location audio playback
• Lots of storage for interviews, extra tracks
• It’s not a camera.