Multi-Directional Drag & Drop in Live 7

Yet another great tip from Huston at Ableton Inc. Seems to work particularly well for audio clips. Although be sure to use the control key (not the Alt key) if you're a PC user:

Atmosphere - The new album from Synth.nl

During the weekend one of my favourite electronic music artists Synth.nl (aka Michel van Ossenbrugen) released his latest album Atmosphere. I really enjoyed his last album (AeroDynamics) so I've been getting rather excited about this new release. I can't wait to get my hands on my own copy.

Thanks to the magic of ReverbNation you can listen to some tracks from both albums via the widget below. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did :)

Live 7 Automation Lanes

Here's a cool feature that I didn't even know about. Looks like it will be a rather useful one too. I keep forgetting about automation cause I've spent so many years working with hardware that only responds to MIDI controller messages which were always difficult to work with on my old sequencer:

Oxygene Part 2 - Jean Michel Jarre

I just couldn't resist posting this video here especially since this is one of the songs that started it all off for me. Below is Jean Michel playing a slightly more modern version live in Poland somewhere. Looks like I need to find the DVD that this video came from ;)

Overview of Live 7's Audio Effect Rack

Another great video from the Ableton channel on YouTube:

The History of the Roland Corporation

I've just read this very interesting series of articles on The History of Roland Corporation on the Sound on Sound magazine web site. It's definitely worth a look if you're interested in this kind of technology.

I was particularly interested to read about how all those classic instruments came about. Plus I feel really lucky to have been able to play with some of them (such as the Roland Space Echo). I'm sure we'll be seeing more great stuff from Roland in the future.

My latest track from Eternity 2008 is online

Eternity 2008 is still a work in progress but now you can listen to it via the magic of ReverbNation. Can either visit my blog (you may already be here) and click on the play button, or you can visit my ReverbNation Profile.

This is my first polished piece in Ableton Live. Most of this track was done using Live 6 LE but I've since upgraded to Ableton 7 Suite. So I'm no longer limited in the number of tracks or plug-ins I can use. Since this is a piece that I'd already written I started construction in the arrangement view:


The Synth1 and SuperwaveP8 VSTi plug-ins can be heard doing the analogue string parts. Everything else is Simpler with Impulse providing the electronic percussion.

Working around Live 7's SoundFont problems

Recently I brought this very excellent bundle of Emax SoundFonts from the Digital Sound Factory. This is a great little collection of classic sounds from the original Emax sample library and when I say little I mean HUGE (800+)!! More on that library later.

If you've worked with SoundFonts before in Live 7 then I've probably struck fear into your heart already. Unfortunately there are some compatibility issues with Ableton Sampler. The good news is that, with the help of the VSTSynthFont plug in, we have a work-around.

This video shows what I'm talking about. I've set up VSTSynthFont and Sampler in two pairs. Each pair has the same instruments from the same SoundFont file. I chose one of the files from the Emax Bundle and the General MIDI file from SynthFont web site. The MIDI clips are also identical. Here's what happens:



Urk! The sample loop problems are probably the most obvious. Sampler's minimum loop length seems to be much bigger that the average loop in some of the smaller SoundFonts that you can download. Also the amplitude envelope is missing as well as a few other important settings like vibrato. For a small number of instruments it's not a big deal. For more than 800 then we've got a problem.

Well why don't we all just switch over to VSTSynthFont I hear you ask? Well unfortunately there are a few compatibility issues there too. Especially with Windows Vista. Dragging MIDI clips around can be quite disastrous:



But we can work around that too by removing the plug in BEFORE we rearrange our Live Set:



So with VSTSynthFont I can get going on those great classic sounds. It's not 100% bullet proof but it works if you treat it right AND the plug in can route audio to individual outputs! When you're trying to take advantage of Live's real power then this is a must have.

Track/Project Preview - Lynx

Here's a video of an unreleased track I'm about to start re-creating using Ableton's Operator instrument. This original version was produced back in the 90's using my collection of hardware synths:



Visualisations by iTunes which were captured with Cam Studio.

Converting my old sample library (Part 3)

It's been a long day. So what better way to chill out than by listening to Groove Unlimited's Dreamscape weekly electronic music podcast. Add to that a little sample conversion for that dose of productivity ;) I'm slowly working my way through my old library:



This will give me a large number of WAV sound files which are just right for importing into Ableton Sampler. Later on I'll use the S-10 Manager to extract information about key splits and loop points. For now it's the mindless driving of the mouse.

Thank goodness I've got the podcast to keep me going :)