Fun with Ableton

So I've spent the past few days setting up a live set using Ableton and my Novation X-Station. So far it consists of 7 audio channels, most of which have a dedicated effect, with a bunch of stuff pre-mapped to the X-Station.

Here's the channel breakdown as it stands now:

• 1: Beat repeat, EQ3 & auto filter
• 2: Dry
• 3: Saturator
• 4: Phaser
• 5: Grain delay
• 6: Dry
• 7: Auto filter
• Send A: filter delay, compressor
• Master: compressor

Channels 1 & 2 are used for drums, and channel 3 for bass. Everything else is used for whatever.

I've mapped 7 of the sliders on my X-Station to the channel volumes, and the buttons above to the mutes. The rest of the knobs and buttons control various effects parameters. Here's the template from the Novation X-Station editor so you can see what I mean:


Here's a run-down by section:

OSCS-MIXER

• SEND A: send A level (ch1)
• REPEAT: toggles beat repeat (ch1)
• LOW CUT: cuts the low on EQ3 (ch1)
• S. LEVEL: saturator dry/wet (ch3)
• S. BASE: saturator base level (ch3)
• P. LEVEL: phaser dry/wet (ch4)
• P. RATE: phaser rate (ch4)
• G.D LVL: grain delay wet/dry (ch 5)

FILTERS
The filters section is mapped to the auto filters on channels 1 & 7 (toggled via the 1-2 button). Ideally I'd have a separate controller for each filter, but this should do for
now.

• F. FREQ: filter frequency
• FLT. RES: filter resonance
• F.E. AMT: filter envelope amount
• F.L. AMT: filter LFO amount (filter 1 only)
• F. TYPE: filter type
  

LFOS

• FLT. RTE: controls the filter rate for filter 1

EFFECTS

• SEND A: feeds send A back to itself
• F.D. FRQ: filter delay filter frequency

As you can see, I still have a few more sliders I could map to an 8th and 9th channel. I'm thinking about adding one channel for MIDI clips, and one for general effects (swooshes, etc.) that I could trigger from different keys. I was also thinking about setting up some side-chain compression, say, take the low-end from channels 1 & 2 (beats) and use it to side-chain the bass channel and possibly my "swoosh" channel.

More to come on this as it evolves :)

Indexing MP3 CDs for DJing

So my fiancé and I DJed at her grandparent's 50th anniversary party last night. I decided to rent CDJs instead of doing the whole turntables + Final Scratch thing, mainly because my needles are not well suited to dance floors (I found this out the hard way at the last party I DJed).

I wanted to print out a spreadsheet with all the tracks, indexed by their number on the CD, so we could easily find them. Here's a quick way I came up with to build a numbered track list from a directory of MP3s.

You will need:

• Notepad
• Excel
• Your MP3s named in the format of "Artist - Track name"

Steps:

1. Open a command prompt
2. Go to the directory containing your MP3s (cd\directory\with\mps)
3. Type: dir /b > list.txt
4. Open list.txt in notepad
5. Search/replace ".mp3 " with nothing
6. Search/replace " - " with ","
7. Rename list.txt to list.csv
8. Double-click it (it should open in Excel)
9. Insert a column
10. Type "=row()" in first row
    
11. Click the bottom right of the cell and drag all the way to the last row. Screenshot of this:

(An alternative to steps 10 & 11 would be to turn on "Row & Column headings" under File -> Page Setup -> Sheet tab)

Voila! You should now have a spreadsheet with track number in column A, artist in column B, and track name in column C. Technically the first 7 or so steps could be built into a batch file if you needed to do this on a regular basis.

Note: if any of the track names had commas in them then will need to clean them up. Alternatively, you could replace " - " with a different delimiter in step 6, though then the process to load the data in Excel would change slightly.

Also note: be sure to do this after you've burned the CDs. Some CD burning software (i.e. Nero) has a different idea of "sort by name" than Windows! (apparently upper case M comes way before lower case M, 10 comes before 2, etc.)

Harmonic mixing 101

Harmonic mixing is where you mix two songs either in the same key, or in complimentary keys. When I used to play vinyl I did this by ear. Now that I'm using Final Scratch I actually index all my MP3s by key.

The nice thing about Final Scratch is that I can "lock" the pitch, so if I'm playing one record at -4% and another at +6% they'll still match. With vinyl I had to account for the pitch difference, so it took much more effort to work out harmonic mixes.

Here's the basic process that I follow with my digital collection:

1. Whenever I buy a new MP3 I'll play it back and try to identify the key using a softsynth. You have to have a bit of an ear for this. Basically, you're looking for the root note. Typically this is the note that the bass line revolves around. I'd say something about being able to differentiate between major and minor keys, but it hasn't come up with any of the electronic music I've bought (it's all minor!)

2. Once I've identified the key I'll stick it in a few different places:

• At the start of the filename (i.e. A#_song.mp3). This allows me to find complimentary tracks without having to even load them up.
• In the ID3/4 comment tags
• At the end of the song title, i.e. Title (A#)

3. When I load everything in FS I just sort on the comment, and when I'm playing a track I can see the key in the title at the top. Yes, there is a place to put the "key" in FS but it's not a standard ID3/4 tag so it doesn't get written to the MP3 AFAIK.


When mixing, I keep a spreadsheet open in the background with all the complimentary keys:



As you can see I've highlighted a few cells in yellow. This is because it can be annoying to move to and from sharp/flat keys, so I've highlighted where these transitions can happen. Lately I've been pitch shifting some songs to create more possibilities (more on this in another post)

An alternative to my technique would be to use the Camelot wheel, and index everything based on key code. This way, when sorted the complimentary tracks would appear side by side. Frankly I don't mind working with the keys though, because they're more meaningful from a musical perspective. It just means a bit more scrolling.