Free pack from Ableton

Break Selection is a collection of Vintage Drum Breaks including 175 drum loops produced by Sample Magic.

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It contains drum kit and hi-hat loops recorded in the very best high-end studios with rare mics, pre-amps and vintage outboard equipment.

The grooves have been meticulously laid down by some of the industry's top players for an authentic feel and vibe across the board. Modern and retro combinations of equipment, mic placements and mixing techniques have been utilized to re-create the very best drum sounds from the decades. This pack is free; you must own Live 9 to use it.

Native Instruments makes a Santa special delivery

Native Instruments is giving away a bunch of cool FREE stuff - including a really useful delay - until Dec 31.

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REPLIKA packs two professional quality delays and a powerful diffusion algorithm into a sleek, streamlined interface. Simple to use with a resonant filter and classic phaser built in.
REPLIKA is a versatile delay for anything from subtle slapback to warped sheets of noise. Available for PC or Mac.

CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music

How absolutely cool is this ... great film, great science.

► NEW VIDEO Automatica: http://nigelstanford.com/y/Cytext-Automatica ► Album & 4k Video: http://nigelstanford.com/y/Cytext-Cymatics ► Spotify: http://NigelStanford.com/y/Spotify Download in 4k / HD. All of the science experiments in the video are real. Watch behind the scenes and see how it was made.

Vinyl fights back

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How do you explain this? Less headroom, lots of nice crackles and scratches. Rumble, wow and flutter. Really? One good thing is that there was always plenty of room for liner notes and photos.
What do you prefer - and more importantly why? Is it pure nostalgia?

Analog is analog. What you record is what you get. Digital uses sampling to approximate the wave curve:

Sampling Rate

  • CD Audio = 44.1 kHz (samples per second) which at 16 bit means 65,536 possible values.

We could do better ...

  • DVD Audio = 192 kHz (samples per second). Nice except that DVD audio discs are very rare.

The next point is that an analog output can be fed directly to your amplifier without any Digital to Analog Conversion (DAC). Anyway, whatever the medium, it all comes down to mp3 format played on an iPhone through cheap ear buds so why care?

Slate Digital - Virtual Mix Rack

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Slate Digital have come out with a Virtual Mix Rack which operates as a virtual 500 series rack with hot-swappable modules. It includes four mix modules, including two classic eq's and two mix compressors. More modules will follow.

As a nice temptation SD are offering a FREE module called Revival. Revival borrows aspects of tubes, tape, transformers, and world class analog filters to create two processes.

There is a nice VU-Meter (lit when unit is active) that displays the output signal level. Unfortunately there is no input signal level setting.

The Shimmer control plays with the high-end of the signal and can be used to add air, brightness and clarity. The Thickness control works on the low-end to fatten just about anything up.

See a demo of Revival here.

You will need an iLok key to store the licence data for Revival (and Revival's license will never expire), but if you choose to buy the whole Virtual Mix Rack for $149, you get an iLok key included in the price.

I have used Revival on individual tracks and it is quite magical on drums, but it can also be used on your mastering to bring out some details.

Using Ableton Live in theatre situations

Ableton Live in the theatre

Ableton Live is immensely useful for theatre performance. I do a lot of the electronic sound effects in Ableton Live where I'm using an Akai APC40 and keyboards to trigger things in Ableton. The sounds have plug-ins applied and are bounced down in advance to avoid CPU load during the live performance. Ableton is also used to trigger video cues and projector shows plus triggering steam jets and smoke machines.

One advantage that handling sound design for a theatre offers is that it is at a fixed location, unlike touring with a band, where venues can differ significantly one from another. However, mixing a live band is one thing but a theatrical performance - especially one so dependent on special effects, with infinite potential for timing changes and pratfalls (both literal and metaphorical) - calls for extreme adaptability and great watchfulness. There's no way the show can be put on a memory stick and left more or less on autopilot. Timing the show and all the special effects to the performers' actual movements needs to be done quite literally footstep by footstep.

This year the Secret Panto Society (SPS) are working on a production of Cinderella and I have four main categories of sound which have to be provided. These are as follows:

  • Songs

  • Dances

  • Atmospherics

  • Sound Effects (SFX)

Songs, dances, atmospherics

The show has recorded music running pretty much continuously throughout, but especially with pantomime, the performers are working off the audience's reactions so sequences never last the same amount of time and musical climaxes are very hard to nail down.

Songs and dances don't present any real problems as the performers follow the music with little scope for ad lib variation; for the atmospherics it is a different matter as the performances change each night and are very dependent on audience reaction. This is particularly noticeable here in the south of France where we have a multi-cultural spread of people and we find that the audience during some performances may be predominantly German or French or Spanish, whilst the last performance is almost exclusively British in make up. The reactions and music timings vary enormously with these different audiences.

Here you can see my Ableton Live project with tracks to cover songs, dances and atmospherics.

Ableton Live used in the theatre

I often split the music into sections, a mix of holding loops and transitional bits of music. Over the course of one scene I may cycle through 5 pieces of music, vamping sections as needed, then moving into the next bit of transitional music leading into another holding loop, and so on.

Ableton Live can easily handle all that vamping and changing with minimal programming and does it in a musical way. I use an Akai professional APC40 connected to Ableton with each APC40 Scene relating to a scene in the pantomime and the APC40 tracks used for songs, dances and atmospherics. Using the faders on the APC40 I can respond to the dynamics in the piece of music and the dynamics of the performance, simultaneously, and make the music complement the performance by riding the music up and down, and fading it out in a musical performance-responsive manner. If required I can also programme in volume automation, filter sweeps, xfade to reverb, complex audio effects processing simply by sending MIDI control change information from the APC40.

SFX

In addition to running the music side of things, Ableton is also taking care of some of the spot sound effects. This is done from a midi keyboard connected to Ableton and triggering a Drum rack. Each drum position can hold a specific SFX which may also have it's own complex audio effects. The outputs are sent to different outputs on my audio interface allowing me to control exactly where in the theatre the sounds should appear i.e. outputs 1&2 are routed to FOH L&R, 3&4 to Upstage L&R, etc.

Triggering a sound effect using Simpler

Triggering a sound effect using Simpler

Ableton is an immensely powerful tool for creating sound designs - DAWs like PT and Logic are only just beginning to catch up with Ableton in terms of pitch/time manipulation. It is also particularly useful for sitting in rehearsals and throwing in SFX which can be fixed more permanently for performances.

Studio maintenance

It's that time again - clean off the collected grime, service the bad parts, refresh the plugs and inserts.
Allen & Heath System 8 - I like the brown scheme. It reminds me of those early EMI consoles from Abbey Road. It is a warm colour, in tune with the warm sound this console has.

Knob colour scheme

Knob Colour Scheme

While sorting out what knobs and caps are missing I can summarise the colour coding as follows:

  • Green = EQ

  • Brown = Aux send

  • Red = Level/Pan/Gain

Meters

To the VU meters. The SQ-10 meter is still being made by Anders, and is stocked by both RS (code 220-368) and Farnell (code 7758219).

Each one has an incandescent bulb to provide illumination. And they blow. And they're fiddly to replace. Channel 3 and 4 are bad but in view of the effort to change them I have decided that I can live with that.

Faders

Original Alps audio-taper K faders are available from Audio Maintenance.

Knobs, Buttons, Fader Caps

The knobs are non-standard parts it seems these days. So your best bet is either find someone who is parting out an old System 8, or get a similar vintage AHB mixer yourself as a parts donor. Same for the button caps and switch caps.

The faders have 8mm tabs, and you can still find supplies of suitable fader caps (see above).

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Some history

The System 8 mixers have been around for many years, and were there at a critical time in British pop. Some artists that have or still use System 8's in their studios and productions.

  • Mungo Jerry apparently used a System 8 on the classic In The SummerTime hit

  • Martyn Ware of Human League and Heaven 17

  • Both The Devil and The Oscillation: From Tomorrow were recorded on a System 8 (in 128 formation).

Tone2 updates FireBird to V2.1 and sets it free

FireBird 2 is now being offered for free by Tone2 the German company based in Munich.

FireBird is not just a subtractive synthesizer but also uses Harmonic Content Morphing synthesis (HCM) which lets you load waveforms from a library and transpose it to bring out different harmonics. The release also contains 70 additional sounds.

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Features

  • Very easy to program and easy to use 

  • A unique sounding synthesis: Harmonic content morphing (HCM) 

  • High sound quality: Warm, transparent 

  • 437 hand picked presets included, over 1000 sounds available 

  • 84 oscillator types containing 18,000 morphable waveforms 

  • 38 different filter types 

  • True stereo mode, 4x unison mode, and up to 8 oscillators per voice 

  • Can sound like other synthesis methods - additive, subtractive, AM, FM, phase distortion, supersaw, vocoder, sync 

  • Can sound like natural instruments like piano, brass, organs... 

  • 23 spectral manipulations or “modifiers” can be applied to the oscillators 

  • 21 arpeggiator types 

  • 13 effect typesSkinable user interface 

You can download from Tone2 here:
https://tone2.com/html/firebird%20vsti%20vst%20synthesizer%20plugin.html