My friend Dylan wrote “Here’s a problem I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now: say you want to drop a track in from the very start instead of fading it in  slowly, but it starts before the first downbeat. (This usually comes up when I’m messing with acapellas, but can apply to a full song as well I suppose.) Is there a clever work-around to drag 1.1 back beyond the start  of the audio file so it drops on 4.2, for example? Then I could trigger  it however many bars earlier as appropriate to let it come in synced.”

1.1 is a convenience point so you can drag the ‘start’ marker before 1.1.   That’s a time saving trick when you’re warping a track — find the first solid, unambiguous downbeat, and then set that as 1.1, warp from there (automatically or manually) and then drag the start point to the actual track start.

BUT — if you set the start marker NOT on a downbeat, you’re not going to get things the way you’d like.  What that seems to mean is ‘the downbeat is offset from what Live thinks is the downbeat.   This lets you play tricks like drag the loop to the middle of a measure, and then set the start on the downbeat, if you want to loop a measure, but combining the first half of one measure with the last half of the previous measure.

The only way I know how to do what Dylan wants is to always keep the start marker on a downbeat.  In Live 8 you can drag the start and end markers before and after the actual clip’s start and end. So you can warp the track starting at a logical place, and then drag the start marker to the downbeat before where you’d like the clip to come in.  In Live 7, you can’t go before or after the clip’s actual beginning or end, unfortunately.

Then, if there’s audio before the beat you want to come in on, use a volume envelope to mute it.  And you have to trigger the clip a measure before where you want the downbeat to fall.

Ideally there’d be a second type of start marker, that would mean ‘start here, but keep the downbeats in sync’ — but there isn’t.

After recording a set last night (which you’ll hear about when I get approval from one artist to use a track) I have spent some time rendering, tweaking, and then re-rendering a mix, because of leveling moves I made in the heat of the moment.  It’s really hard unless you have some sort of giant external meter to watch to keep things properly leveled.

Several times during the mix I brought tracks up to the point they were pegging the limiter giving you that dreaded ‘solid ingot’ waveform.  I’m going to take the limiter out of my standard setup and resolve to watch the meters better, and use my ears. If you clip the main output in Live a little bit it does a fairly good job of soft-limiting to keep from going into digital clipping.  But it’s better that you LISTEN to what you’re doing and be conservative than to use the limiter as a crutch.

The problem isn’t that it sounds ‘bad’ — it sounds OK.  But it doesn’t sound great, because you lose all dynamics. If you’re DJing, everything you play has already been mastered and limited within an inch of it’s life, to limit it more is to second guess the mastering engineers, using much less sophisticated tools.

As for the general philosophical idea of DJing in Live — I love playing vinyl, but especially when it comes to making a studio mix, I like the flexibility that Live gives you, and freedom from cuing and beatmatching as primary concerns.  When I do one of my studio mixes, my concern is to showcase the stuff I’ve recently acquired in a way that is meaningful musically to me, not show off my skills.

I go through a lot of tracks to find the ones that speak to the mood I’m going for, and pre-sequence them, usually in order of tempo.  I actually do record the actual mix in real time — I’m triggering and fading and EQing live.  But I’m not above going back and correcting levels.  Or in the mix I just did, loop the end of one track to make the transition to the next more graceful.

My goal is to get to where I don’t have to tweak after the fact, and every time I record a set I get closer.  When I listen to the first mixes I did with Live a couple years ago they make me cringe.  I want to be able to get in front of a crowd and use the flexibility of Live to make it sound great and move a crowd.  Getting away from using the mouse and staring at the screen can make a big difference.  The APC40 is nice in that way, but actually the mappings I have for the XSession Pro are a more complete mouse-eliminator.

The build quality is impressive. Almost absurdly so — the knobs are big and solid, the faders are smooth. The hard rubber end cheeks are some designers wet dream — they seem to have no purpose except to enhance the ‘stealth bomber’ profile. The case proper is sheet metal with smooth bends. It’s not really a criticism per se, but a plastic case would have made it more transportable — it’s heavy. This plus a laptop in a bag, and you’ll not want to be lugging it all over Berlin.

My only criticism of it design-wise has nothing to do with ergonomics: The faders and knobs will be vulnerable during transport, and the box it came in is pretty bulky. They need to come up with a padded bag with foam ribs at the side so you don’t break off sliders or knobs. If they made one with room for a laptop, I’d buy it — something like the M-Audio Oxygen8 bags…

In operation, there’s very little to write about; it does a good job of taking your head out of the computer screen, and if you’re comfortable with Live, it will make complete sense after about 5 minutes of use.

The one thing I found sub-optimal is the Device Control section. If you select an instance of a Live Instrument, the knobs are automatically mapped to … whatever the first 8 parameters the instrument exposes. These are almost never the most useful parameters to be tweaking, and in the case of Collision you have to hunt around the instrument panel to try and find what they’re changing.qqqq

So in order to mess with a Live instrument’s parameters you have to put it in an instrument rack and assign the macro knobs to something meaningful. For VST instruments and FX the new Live 8 parameter mapping UI makes it a little better — you choose which parameters are exposed and you can rearrange them. But the Device Control knobs are pretty useless for Live Instruments and FX unless you wrap them in a rack.

But all in all it’s a very nice controller for Live, and very nearly the perfect controller for live performance. It’s not revolutionary or amazing, but it solidly does what needs doing, and makes interacting with live a lot more tactile. Just being able to trigger or turn off multiple tracks is huge — it’s something I was always trying to do with the mouse, and it’s not a natural move.

Oh, and tried to look at the top secret MIDI handshake between Live and the APC40 with MIDI-OX and failed. They’ve set up the MIDI driver for the APC40 so it’s single client (meaning only one program at a time can access it) — so if I load MIDI-OX and try and run live, Live won’t talk to the APC 40, and if I try and load MIDI-OX after Live, it won’t be able to open the ports. Given that the only connection is USB, someone will have to use a lower-level tool to try and figure this stuff out.

Cet obscur objet du désir

I ordered my Akai APC40 yesterday, and called them to ask if they were backordered and when they’d ship, and they said “we have plenty of stock and we’re shipping tomorrow” — meaning today. If you were wondering where to get one.

If you’re not aware of what the APC40 is, it is a MIDI controller tailored for use with the Ableton Live music software.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-LiveGrooveQuantize.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-LiveGrooveQuantize.mp3

So what I did here:

1. Load the track “Amazon” by El-B (from The Roots of El-B into live. (You can hear a sample of it here.)
2. Set 1.1.1 in the timeline to a downbeat. Make the loop region 2 bars starting there. Drag the ‘end’ marker for the track to the end of the loop. Drag the downbeat transients to line up with the timeline downbeats.
3. Right click the resulting clip and select Extract Groove(s)

Then you can apply your groove to any midi clip. Cool…

Other interesting things you can do with grooves:

1. You can drag a groove into a midi track to look at it, or e.g. trigger a hi hat. The beginning of the Audio example above starts out with the raw groove template played by itself.

2. You can drag any midi file into the groove pool. Together with 1, you can edit grooves. In the case of the El-B ‘Amazon’ groove there wasn’t a hit on every 16th note, in which case I don’t know what it does to the timings of notes that fall in the holes, so I plugged the holes with new notes and fiddled with them until they fit the rest of the groove.

3. You can put a groove on a track, and mess with the settings — the random setting and groove amount in particular — until you like the sound created and then hit ‘commit’ on the clip. That quantizes the notes in the clip to the groove settings. Then you can drag the midi clip back into the groove pool and have a new groove.

4. You can apply a groove to many clips simultaneously. Like — every clip in your session. Select the clips to put the groove on in the session view or hit ctrl-A (or cmd-A) to select all. The groove box is in the same place as it would be for a single clip. Then you can choose a groove and it applies to all selected clips.

5. There’s a slider that sets the amount of groove from zero to 130% — I understand what 0-100 means: it drags the notes 0 to 100% of the way to the nearest groove point. I’m not sure what it means past 100%, except that a swing groove swings even harder, and if you have non-zero randomization set, it’s even randomer. At any rate it can sound very cool.

Image stolen from Rootoon.com

• Ableton Live Users
• Reaktor Users
• People wonky enough to try and automate VST plugins with envelopes.

Still with me? OK.

I was contacted by an Internet acquaintance because he wanted to use the Reaktor Effect that emulates the Roland RE201 Space Echo, and he wanted to automate it with envelopes.  There are two places you can do this — In the ‘Session View’ on a per-clip basis, and in the ‘Arrangement View’ on a per-track basis.

The way you do this, in both cases is by selecting the plugin instance  from a pull down menu of Automatable Things, and then select the parameter to automate from a separate pull down menu just below the first.  In the case of the ‘Session View’ there’s a first step — select a clip, then on the far left hand side of its properties, click on the little ‘E’ in the bottom row.

In this case, all the parameters of the RE201 were just invisible.  I asked about it on the NI Reaktor Forum, and got this answer.

So I wrote back to my friend with this advice, which may stand you in good stead should you ever get into this sticky situation:

Live before rev 8 only recognizes the first 128 automation parameters.  The parameters (i.e. changeable knobs and controls) each has an ID that’s unique per instrument.  These IDs get assigned as an ensemble is created, and if you delete a control, the ID isn’t re-used.

When it comes to Automation, the parameters are exposed by the standard VST mechanism, with each Reaktor parameter being the Base ID for the instrument, plus the ID of the control.

In the case of RE201, the base parameter was 500-something, so all controls were invisible to Ableton Live.

If you look in the Reaktor Instrument Properties, click on the control routing tab. (the two little boxes with an arrow between them).

At the bottom, there’s an ‘Automation’ section.  Do two things:

Pull down the ‘IDS’ menu, and select ‘Instrument Up’ until the base ID is zero. Then pull down the ‘IDS’ menu again and select ‘Sort and Compress IDs’

This will make all of the controls in the RE201 visible in Live. Honest to God.