Ableton Forum

If you want generic / simple beats, why not learn to make them from scratch? It's not like there's Just One Magic Way To Do It(tm)...

gangsta trance

oh noes it's another WHAT IS ELECTRO thread I'll just point out here that on the last two Drexciya albums there were some slamming 4/4 tunes that I have a hard time calling anything but electro. on the other hand, there's a lot of "electro house" that just sounds like watered-down crap, so...

I'd suggest spending maybe $500 US on a pair of half-decent monitors now. You can easily spend ten times that much, but they won't make your music ten times better. (not yet, anyway) Always, always, always listen to your mixes on as many systems as you can get your hands on: crappy car stereos, good...

Dude, use your ears. Pretty much all of my analog recordings are "off" by some amount -- be it due to audio interface latency that Live doesn't compensate quite right, latency from hardware effects (like analog delays and envelope followers), latency from my fingers, whatever. I fix it. So...

you don't make friends with salad!
you don't make friends with salad!
you don't make friends with salad!

Also, if you find that pitching your bass drum (or whatever) down makes it sound weird, consider running it through a highpass filter with fairly high resonance and a low cutoff. That can add a nice tight boom to an otherwise dull sound.

One other bit of common advice that's kind of hard to get your head around to start with -- when you're EQing, try to remove frequencies (cut) rather than boosting. Otherwise things get muddy really quick.

Well, (a), it's pretty damn useful this way for live performance. The transport is the one common element between arrange / session, and if you want you can have a base arrangement and trigger clips over top of it. Even if you've got no arrangement stuff, it's nice to have a way to easily start a se...

having to play a show is the best motivator I know (though often I feel like my stuff is utter shit until after the show) -- that's pulled me out of dry periods pretty consistently. also, if I'm having trouble with one kind of track (some finely-engineered dancefloor mayhem or whatever) I'll shift g...

Yeah, this is a nasty plateau stage that you have to work through... I think it largely comes from having too many options in front of you. I usually start with some kind of "sketch" that can define a song, at least a little. I tend to fart around making that first noise for either hours o...

nice one.

on a similar (hah) note, I'm often working with big chunks of repitched audio, so tempo and pitch are linked. anyone got a table or other shortcut to answer questions like "to raise the pitch by 5 semitones, what do I multiply the song tempo by?"?

Dumb question: are you working in the session or arrange view? If the latter, do you have an arranger loop defined? That would do it.

Well, yeah, it is hard. It's traditionally been less about forcing records to be in key with one another, and more about choosing ones that already are (and that work thematically, etc.). You know, the part of DJ'ing where you actually have to think like a musician (or at least a conductor).

Amaury: I started downloading 6.0.7 yesterday and noticed that it was downloading very, very slowly (maybe 1kbps or so). Happily, when I started over it was fast again.