52 Reason and Record Tips Week 4 – Unlocking the Secrets of CV and Gate. from James Bernard on Vimeo.

Reason and Record may lack plug-in support, but what they do have – open-ended patching between the available modules, in the tradition of analog synthesizers – opens up plenty of creative possibilities. The only sad news is that many Reason uses don’t take full advantage of that depth.

Here are three tutorials to get you started, if you’re not familiar with how to do this (or if you need a video to send your friends to get them patching). At top, James Bernard continues his 52 tips in 52 weeks series with a general look at how the CV and gate connections work. From Propellerhead’s Matt Piper, we have two videos with guitar, one routing through Malström and the other through the Thor synth. Matt tells me that in the Malström vid, “once the patch creation portion starts (at 0:36), there are no edits thereafter– it is a ‘live performance’ that I hope is somewhat musical.”

Being a digital musician requires a new set of skills, a precise tack between the forces of engineering and creativity. Robert Henke aka Monolake is always someone I find thought-provoking, not only because he’s so open and articulate, but because he seems uniquely focused on balancing those two sides of his personality. As a media artist and producer, his work relies heavily on his own technological invention, but he is also able to keep true to his own aesthetic compass.

For acoustic evidence of where Robert’s mind is exploring, his full-length album Silence, released last month on his own Imbalance label, reverberates with clarity. To my own ears, its crystalline rhythms and finely-honed, always-foreground timbres and textures recall all the best of Monolake through the years, back to the early, pre-Ableton collaboration between Robert and (now Ableton CEO) Gerhard Behles. (For an eloquent review, see Fact Magazine’s take.)

As far as engineering in the sense of recording and production, Robert did a terrific interview with engineer/musician Caro Snatch for her blog; she gets some fascinating answers out of him and they even talk about his technique of avoiding compression on electronic sources. But I was interested in how engineering can work in the compositional sense: with open-ended tools like Ableton Live and Max/MSP, how do you create compositional systems? How do you wrestle with the potential of Max inside Live? Where do you draw limits?

As always, Robert has some sharp ideas – whether fodder for inspiration or disagreement, I think you’ll find things worth talking about. And indeed, while technology figures prominently, I think you’ll find some ideas that are really fundamentally about music, about compositional intent, thinking about sound, and thinking about rhythm.

How to do mpc pad finger drumming from Brandon Murphy on Vimeo.

Composer, musician, and drummer Brandon Murphy has put together a how-to video on playing and programming beats with a 4×4 grid. One reason to pay attention: he’s a real drummer, and had been just as skeptical about the value of all this as you probably are:

I’ve been using an MPC longer than I’ve owned a computer and something that never appealed to me was “finger drumming”. It evoked thoughts of s***ty 80’s outdoor music festival wankery, dudes with offensive looking devices strapped around their necks and lots of synthetic “tom tom” fills. Even recently speaking, “live MPC” usually implied super played out “battle” routine style stuff. Fortunately, a new generation of talented producers and performers decided to reclaim the drum machine’s potential as a realtime performance instrument (right around the time MPC’s were kind of running out of steam I’ll add).

What changed his mind? Artists doing things drummers can’t, and making production more productive in the process. (Check out the video and his full blog post for more.)

The resulting technique he uses isn’t so much about the MPC or even his tool of choice, Ableton Live, as it is finding a comfortable mapping that makes composing and performing beats more ergonomic. After sharing various tips at the Chicago Ableton Users Group, Brandon has put together the technique above.

To me, it suggests ideas not only about making quick drum breaks, but also assembling pitch generally into arrangements that help you play. Coming from a piano background, I do believe that arrangement and layout of keys can be important, and that even a simple (12-tone equal temperament? black and white?) configuration can turn out to have incredible potential. Of course, this does also reveal why a 4×4 grid is valuable, even as 8×8 or larger monome-style arrays catch on.

Got tips or techniques of your own? Find you can play Javanese slendro a whole lot faster on your custom hexagonal keypad on your dodec-o-phone? Let us know in comments. (Comments currently under moderation, but they’ll appear after a short delay.)

Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Trifonic: Editing Beats – Part 1 from Next Step Audio on Vimeo.

No more secrets: that could well sum up the zeitgeist of music making in 2010. So it is that Trifonic, aka virtuoso beatmeister brothers Brian and Laurence Trifon of San Francisco, share their technique for chopping up and glitching out audio. Their new blog, Next Step Audio, is entirely dedicated to sharing their production techniques:

http://nextstepaudio.com/ [site slightly erratic response-wise for me at press time]

The video tutorial on beat editing, published by Next Step Audio, starts out generically enough: grab the ubiquitous “Amen break” as a sample, load it into Apple’s Logic Pro, slice it by beat and adjust to transients, gate… but Trifonic explains how they take the results further, drawing envelopes for modulation and winding up with something far removed for the original. Of course, if you’re fatigued of the “Amen break,” you could apply the same technique to samples of your own playing, and you could substitute your DAW of choice, from Live to Pro Tools, for the editing.

Part of what makes this tutorial compelling is that the duo has a distinctive musical identity, rather than being the anonymous, all-knowing voice music tech instructors had tried to be in the past. It’s worth checking out their music, too. Digitally-distorted, glitching beats had threatened to become a tired cliche years ago, but Trifonic combines those sharper digital timbres with rich, warm layers of sound. The shifting textures of the video for “Parks on Fire,” a big single for them, matches that musical structure perfectly in visuals. (The video is the work of the terrific Scott Pagano, an LA-based visualist.)

There’s plenty more music to share, too, and you can even grab a free Trifonic bass patch for Logic’s EXS24 and Native Instruments’ Kontakt 3 (or compatible samplers, which includes just about everything).