My Window To The World…

This week we started rehearsing with momokomotion for our show this coming Friday.

Since momokomotion could not find a keyboard player yet, we will be using backing tracks on every song.

Being the drummer, I am in charge of feeding the PA system with the backing tracks. I am running them in Ableton Live (Version 5.x), off my Apple iBook G4, into the M-Audio Fast Track Pro; Channel 1 is the actual backing track, channel 2 the click track.

On one song I was persistently thrown off the beat, which was very annoying. Even more so because it did not seem to make any sense.

I did some research via Yahoo! and Google and found some valuable information.

The click track that the studio engineer had recorded for me was nothing more than a metronome sound (very annoying and poison for your hearing!), with an accent on the 1 of every beat.

In Ableton Live, I played the backing track (audio), then created a MIDI track, and went through different drum sounds to find one that I felt most comfortable with. I programmed the MIDI drum to play the kick drum on 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the 4/4 beat, added a dry tambourine sound to the 1, and set it to “loop”. Those MIDI drum sounds feel more natural to the ears, and grooving along to them is much easier and much more fun than the high-pitched metronome.

I played around with different sounds on the click track, and varied them slightly on two of the songs. (The kick drum sound I had first used was “drowned” by other frequencies in those songs, so changing the sound was the solution.)

To hear the backing track as well as the click track, I used the headphones output on the M-Audio Fast Track Pro. It has a nice “Mix” function. Depending on the song, I would change the balance (mix) between the backing track and the click track.

This solution, BTW, did not help to solve the initial problem. The engineer had done something wrong on the click track of that song, and there was no time to have him redo it. How did I work it out? Instead of a “proper” click track, I put the original song from the CD as my click track, and switched off the backing track in my headphones. Guess what? We went through the song without any difficulties!

On a sidenote: in some loud live situations, the M-Audio Fast Track Pro headphones output might not produce enough volume for you to be able to hear everything easily, so I recommend having a preamp ready, just in case. And always remember: use custom-made earplugs at any gig! The standard ones that are readily available in supermarkets are useless!

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: How to play with click track, click track for drummer, drums, drummer, playing with click track

I have received several reports from customers having problems with their Ableton Live music production software.

Without exception, their complaints were related to “Hard Disk Overload” error messages and/or the “CPU Load” exceeding 100 %, accompanied by that beautiful (not) distorted sound. (Make sure this will not happen to you at a live show.)

Let me explain

- how well Ableton Live works (1),

- how the CPU / harddrive issues are caused (2), and

- how you can work around those difficulties without investing money into a more powerful computer, more RAM, or a higher-capacity harddrive (3).

(1) Ableton Live was designed as a MIDI controller. Audio capabilities were added only in later versions, as far as I know.

On my Apple iBook G4 (1.33 GHz, with only 512 MB RAM), Ableton Live will work beautifully with up to twenty MIDI tracks (as long as they are not too complex), plus three short (ca. 3 minutes each) audio tracks.

(2) Problems do not start until MIDI and/or audio effects are added. Most built-in effects (especially the presets that are made up of several separate effects) will hit the computer’s CPU hard. Use one too many, and you will see 100 % in the “CPU Load” window.

Ableton Live loads Audio tracks into its virtual memory (for which it uses your harddrive), so the longer your audio tracks and the higher the number of them, the more likely you will run into harddrive space issues. (This is very important for those of you DJing with the software.)

(3) With a bit of imagination and common sense, however, it is still possible to produce music on your “outdated” computer.

This is how I do it:

Using Ableton Live’s internal MIDI sound bank, I create a rough version of my song. No effects on any of the tracks.

After I have finalized one (or all) of the instruments and the arrangement, I re-record each instrument (directly into Ableton Live) using Propellerheads’ Reason, which has a far superior soundbank anyway. (It will instantly make your track sound a lot better!)

What difference does this make, you ask? During playback, audio tracks (preferrably with all the effects you want on them recorded directly into them) use far less CPU power than (complex) MIDI tracks.

Do run some tests yourself and compare MIDI vs. audio - the difference is huge.

In future articles I will go further into Ableton Live, computer music production, and DJing with Ableton Live.

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: Ableton Live, Propellerheads Reason, Music Production, Computer Music Production, Ableton Live CPU Load, Ableton Live Hard Disk Overload, Hard Disk Overload