020100118 23:16 • 
I spent most of last week at NAMM in Anaheim, doing Max For Live demonstrations with Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. It was a wonderful trip, with the majority of my time spent speaking about two of my favorite tools for making sound and vision: Max/MSP/Jitter and Live. NAMM itself was the usual mix of marketing and musicians, and I met an entire crew of amazing friends, new and old. In terms of devices, I was particularly taken by Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 and Eigenlabs Eigenharp.
Above you can see me, Gregory Taylor and Andrew Benson at the Cycling ‘74 area, a space shared with Ableton. I had expected high interest in Max For Live from users on the Ableton side of the road, who would be well-versed in the use of Live but not so familiar with Max. There were many in this group. Somewhat surprisingly, many Live users had already embraced and extended with Max For Live and brought us deep questions about its use, techniques and possibilities. Add the Max users moving their immense toolboxes of tricks into Max For Live and every conversation was a new treasure.
Here’s Huston Singletary of Ableton introducing me before one of the Max For Live sessions. I ran through demos with the Big Three from Max For Live (Loop Shifter, Step Sequencer, Buffer Shuffler), then talked about how to construct a set for live performance using these monsters and a small army of custom devices I’ve created for my own composition and performance: a Monome clip-triggering interface with offset for stacking an entire evening of tracks in one Live set; a Max for Live drum rack built from many different synthesis types with randomizing parameters and probability gates; an audio gate with recombinant sequencing of states; a randomizing, sequenced delay with pitch shift.
I rocked a minimal hardware setup: Korg NanoKontrol, Monome 40h and a spanky new MIDIfighter. Since the controllers were minimal, I played a stripped down version of a new Wolf Interval track for the short performance, extended after each day with some new bits of audio I grabbed with my PCM-D50 from around the convention center and various NAMM-related events and gatherings.
It was such a terrific time, the week tried hard not to end. Flying out, my flight on Virgin was delayed by inclement weather. I ended up connecting with other unexpectedly waiting Max and Live users before, during and after the short jump home to San Francisco.
020090523 20:15 •
Like the transmogrification of Pluggo, this post has been some time in the works. Attendees of Expo ‘74 had Pluggo’s squish confirmed at the event, but the writing was on the wall much earlier. In the wake of Cycling ‘74’s announcement that Pluggo is now Max For Live, I’m inundated with emails from friends and users wondering what will happen to their favorite sonic FSU software: the Daevl.Plugs. Now is the time to let the cat out of the bag.
First, as context, let me drop some history for the Daevl.Plugs. I created the Daevl.Plugs in Max/MSP back in 02006, but they began life long before that year as parts of a toolbox of patches I use to create music solely in Max/MSP. I boarded the Ableton Live maglev train all the way back at version 1, and as my use of it grew I found myself needing to integrate Live and my Max music making machinery more tightly. Pluggo provided this as a VST/AU wrapper for Max patches.
I generally prefer clean, minimal interfaces. The look of the Daevl.Plugs comes entirely from my love of minimal tool design as created within the strict GUI limitations of the Max 4 environment. Somewhere during the first pass at the process I realized through Pluggo I could make the Daevl.Plugs widely available to people with no Max experience, who simply wanted to manipulate audio in interesting, non-repetitive ways. Several more design revisions to generalize the interfaces so users wouldn’t have to be me to understand them and the Daevl.Plugs came screaming into the world.
I tried to have no expectations for success or failure at their release. A small concession was made to copy protection in the form of serial number authorization, mainly to provide a widely accepted method of signaling to honest people the commercial nature of the product, though I set the price low at $36.
I was stunned by the response. Since 02006 the Daevl.Plugs have been purchased in huge numbers, by people throughout the audio and video worlds of all levels and interests: bedroom hobbyist to post-production guru, electronic cult act to professional rock star. Add in piracy orders of magnitude higher, and they’ve made their way throughout the sonic landscape of the latter half of the Twenty Zeros.
The main benefit of Pluggo was instant leveraging of work done in Max/MSP. Rather than create a VST and AU from the ground up, with all the attendant troubles and shenanigans of those two plug-in formats, Pluggo allowed me to take my work in Max and move fast. The troubles and shenanigans were still being dealt with, just not by me. Cycling ‘74 handled the compatibility nightmare. When compatibility issues began to uncoil with VST3 hosts and an increasing parade of problems with newer ProTools versions began, I began to see an imminent playground design shift. I’ve kept it in mind since: I built a castle in their sandbox.
Enter Ableton Live in a big way. From the data I’ve gathered, the Daevl.Plugs user base is comprised of mostly Live users at somewhere above 80%. There are a significant percentage who use Live in conjunction with another environment, such as Logic or Digital Performer, but over 4/5 of those rocking the Daevls use Live at some point in their workflow. Given that Live is the most widely used and generally the most compliant and well behaved of the host environments available, I understand Cycling’s decision to focus solely on a host where maximum cooperation is possible. Throw in the unique aspects of Live plus Ableton’s willingness to break ground and it seems a perfect match.
Here’s the open bag, here’s the cat: I’ll be converting the entire suite of Daevl.Plugs to Daevl.Plugs MFL. I’ll still support the current Pluggo version of the Daevl.Plugs until Max For Live is released later this year, at which point they’ll only be available by request and with no promises of support. All purchasers of the Daevl.Plugs will get a free upgrade to Daevl.Plugs MFL.
What’s this? Another cat in the bag! In addition, there is a second set of plug-ins, the Daemon.Plugs, which I’ll be releasing only as MFL devices. These have been in development for some time, continually bumping up against the edge of what Pluggo was capable of. They’re much better served in their functions by Max For Live.
I’m saddened by the death of Pluggo and the closing of old possibilities, but I’m excited by the new possibilities opened by Max For Live. Pluggo, in attempting to live everywhere, ended up a second class citizen in all environments. Max For Live will reach levels of integration Pluggo could barely dream of. It’s a quantum leap for Max and Pluggo users, and a vast new world for the exploration of those beaming in from Live.
Change happens. Evolution is built on strengths, not weaknesses.
It’s time to do something new.
020060114 23:27 •
I’ve spent the last 4 hours of the evening chopping up drums tracks for several songs in Ableton Live. It’s monotonous work, but essential for control over the individual drum sounds. I separate rhythm tracks at the recording or bounce stage whenever possible, but sometimes, because of the way I’ve applied effects or because of the original method of generation, it’s time to slice.
I have developed what I think is probably the quickest way of slicing with the most amount of discretionary control:
- I place my source rhythm track (rebeat) above the tracks the individual hits of type will be dropped into (rekick, resnare, rehat, reblock). I then loop bar by bar as I edit.
- Soloing the source channel, I slice up the source as the selection loops, starting at the left and working to the right.
- As I slice, I drag and drop the individual hits to their non-soloed tracks beneath the source. This creates a silence at the head of the source material I’m editing, and lets me hear on the next loop through whether I missed the tail of a hit or got part of the next drum sound.
- After I’ve sliced and moved all the source material to its appropriate individual tracks, I solo out each track, listening to the placed material. This lets me hear the isolated edits alone and identify any mistakes or misplacements I may have made.
- If all tracks are solid, I unsolo all and make sure the bar’s timing is still proper. Working fast, a dragged hit may bump itself unnoticed to the next time marker in the grid. This step lets me find these problems.
- On to the next bar.
020051013 22:50 •
Working earlier with comped vocals, I applied a favored technique for atmosphere and the touch of strange.
Where I originally learned the trick on David Bowie’s “Heroes” vox is lost to memory, but I’ve used variations many times. It’s tremendous fun while recording live and the vocalist can play with their volume, but with automated manipulation of levels (I use volume envelopes in Ableton Live) may be used in controlled and programmatic fashion on any source. I’m not sure if the progenitor is Visconti or Eno, but my thanks go to either or both for a shining example of emotional soundscaping through studio magic.
The basic trick is accomplished with an original close mic vocal take and two (or more) aux sends:
- The main track gets a very light touch of reverb.
- The sends have progressively heavier gating on each, letting through only louder levels of vox. The gate on the final send must be set to only open when vocal volume is at maximum loudness.
- After the gates place a reverb on each send to suit your application, each progressively wetter than your main take.
Often I find perfection at this point, but a final light compression and touch of verb to gel the signals can sometimes serve as sonic icing.
If you want faithful reproduction, keep in mind Bowie was recorded in a large room with three mics placed progressively farther away from him. As above, vary the wet/dry ratios progressively to emulate the close/far situation, but use the same or identical reverb space on each.
Remember: don’t stick with tradition or you’ll miss all the thrills. I’ve used this effect on everything from vox to guitars, keyboards to drums, with mismatched reverb spaces and heavy compression and subtractive EQ for sculpting each signal.
This technique lasts far longer than “just for one day.” Heroes experiment.
020050803 21:00 •
Live has been in my music-making arsenal since version 1.5 and it just keeps getting better. Once Ableton added MIDI to the mix Live basically replaced Digital Performer as my studio’s heartbeat. Every release adds new capabilities without sacrificing immediacy of use. Amazingly, Ableton created Live barebones and added major features in a series of well-wrought steps, forging the program into a conceptually designed masterpiece without direct sacrifice to the perceived whims of a “me too” marketplace.
Live 5 continues the refinement...
Clip Freeze - I take digital audio and turn it into something else. I stretch, mangle, warp, destroy, re-fry, transmogrify until I end up with something so far from previous form you would be hard pressed to even admit the possibility of connection. This, my friends, requires serious processing power. The kind of power which will reduce your CPU to molten tears and keep your caffeine of choice steaming by simply placing mug near chip. Ableton’s brilliantly managed Clip Freeze will turn an entire column of massively effexored clips into static samples, in place and with a single contextual menu click. I can then continue compositional mayhem using the frozen clips. A later tweak to the effects chain is as simple as unfreezing the track.
Launchable Arrangement Locators - Drop them all over your track at key locations, assign MIDI or qwerty keys to them and then play the broad arcs of your music, with quantization, in real time. You will never create arrangements the same way again.
Live Clips - Save a library of individual bits and pieces of sound, with all the effects, settings, audio or softsynths gathered into one Live Clip. Drop the Live Clip into a new track and it’s all there, just as you made it.
And that’s only the first few stairsteps up the mountain to the sky. New effects like Beat Repeat, Saturator and the customizable Arpeggiator, new ways of auditioning portions of audio, new ways of packaging sets of sounds and settings in Live Packs, batch pre-analysis of entire directories of audio… more unexpected fun than I realized I wasn’t having in many moons.
020050511 14:41 •
After the ticky doings of Explode/Implode comes something much more fun. The process I call Rhythm Mouth is the fastest, most intuitive way I’ve found to add fills, flourishes and percolation to static beat tracks when working almost exclusively in the realm of digital edits.
I use an inexpensive Plantronics USB mic/headset combo and let the track I’m working on run while I literally mouth bits and pieces of rhythm and record it to a new take.
While processed vocal rhythms can sound incredibly strange, especially when layered with more regular percussion, the new “mouth” track is mainly a guide for aligning existing drum sounds. Rather than try to capture ideas two or three steps beyond the generating machine in my head, I’m cutting out as many middlemen as possible. Brain to tongue to audio, the question becomes “Which existing rhythm sound should I replace these mouth parts with, to best perform these fill patterns?” Since the tracks of musician-speak are not meant for actual production, I can use this process anywhere without worrying about sound quality.
Bonus: the looks on faces as people pass while I’m beat-boxing into my laptop.
020050506 15:31 •
Part of Make Sense is Explode/Implode. Basic sense has been made of the composition’s physical structure, so it’s time to re-work the data for the purpose of a mix. Looped or composite audio must be sliced and split off to discrete tracks.
Once individual drums are stackable by type, it becomes much easier to spot rhythmic relationships and redundancies. Sonic layering is preserved while maximizing creative flexibility. Two kick drums can be fused in the stereo field’s center, alternately dropped out, panned rapidly off to each side, individually compressed or rhythmically altered without affecting their companion snares from the original two track recording. Submixing by like type allows all to be treated at once.
Except in cases of very minimal compositions, I tend to work with the drums as a break out session. Only rhythm and bass tracks are present in the file, and perhaps a guide bounce of everything else. This is easier on processor and quicker on saves. Ultimately I drop the drums back to stereo files, either as a whole or by category (all kicks, all snares, all hats, all things going whirr) and re-insert them in the main working file.
020050503 23:27 •
Chris had his way with it last week and .Mac’d it over, so today I began work in earnest on the first track of the EP. Working title for this piece: Rotate. I’m roughly documenting the creation process of this recording, fine-tuning it afterwards for a complete HowTo.
I’ve marked out a basic plan for work on each track once Chris hands it off. Step One: Make Sense. These tracks have floated back and forth for months between our laptops and studios, meaning the accumulated cruft and grit around the edges of the Live files really shows. As I’m mixing and mastering after my surgical work on the pieces, I can blend the writing/finishing stages from go. Make Sense is all about organizing, naming and routing the various parts of the composition, taking into account both continued writing/creation and the needs of a mix/master session at the end. Track collapsing, effects ganging, aux grouping and, as you can see by the screenshot, renaming for clarity is in order. Make Sense is about definition.
The roughs have been created through accretion. The polished tracks will be born of subtraction.
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