By Daniel Rothmann (T7) www.danielrothmann.com

Introduction

So you’re new to electronic music production. You don’t know much about it all, but that’s OK, everyone has been at this point of experience. I figured the best way to start this series out would be explaining basic drum programming. While many may know very little (if any) theory on the subject, drum programming is quite a bit easier accessible than chords and harmony, since it doesn’t require direct acquaintance with music theory. Even for the inexperienced ear, you can usually tell if a rhythm just isn’t right, or sounds strange in some way. During this tutorial we’re going to set you up with the basic tools you need to get grooving. First, let me introduce you to the software.

The software

The two most widely known techniques for producing drums sounds on a computer are drum synthesis and drum sampling.

Drum synthesis is typically a polyphonic synthesizer that comes with a set of preset parameters that you can change to a certain degree. Some of these could be drum pitch, waveform, noise amount, saturation, and so on. Drum synthesizers are similar to regular synthesizers in the way that they generate (synthesize) a drum sound from scratch, live. Generally, drum synthesizers differ from regular synthesizers in the way, that the drum synth generally have some preset parameters that can only be changed to a very small degree. This could, for example, be the pitch envelope of a kick drum. The way the kick drum very promptly (in a matter of milliseconds) drop from a high pitch to a low one in order to generate a ‘punchy’ effect in sound.

Drum sampling is essentially taking a sample (a recording), i. e. an acoustic snare sound or an electronic hihat from a drum synthesizer, and playing it back whenever a certain note or switch is triggered inside the software. Drum samplers usually feature parameters such as individual sample volume, pitch, length, pan etc. Drum samplers differ from the drum synthesizers by not producing any sound from scratch, you utilize a sample that has already been recorded, prefabricated and modify it according to your musical aspiration.

First of all, let me introduce you to the drum sampler we’re going to be working with: Ableton Live’s ‘Impulse’. It is a decent-quality drum sampler, with some relatively typical features (and a few not-so-typical). In eight square slots, samples can be loaded and played back. Each sample has separate controls for pitch, decay, volume, pan, filter, saturation, timestretch and more. Some of these can be affected by velocity (how ‘hard’ the note is pressed on the keyboard, defining the strength of the particular tone) and some parameters can be set to select a random value with each new note. These things can come in very handy when you want to program a bit of variety into your beats.

Let’s get busy

In this tutorial, we’re going to program an electronic drum kit from scratch, using pre-fabricated drum samples from the internet. We’re going to be using Ableton Live’s ‘Impulse’ which is, as I’ve already mentioned, a drum sampler.

1. For legal reasons, I cannot supply you with samples, even if they are available for free on the Internet. The samples I’ve used are from www.Pettinhouse.com, a site that provides free drum samples. I chose their ‘VKE Modem’ drum kit ‘“ You can download it for free here: http://www.pettinhouse.com/html/vke_modem.html.
   
2. Download the drum kit (for NI Battery, even though we will be using Abletons Impulse, the raw samples are in that package) and extract the folder named ‘Modem Kit Samples’ to wherever you like to have your drum samples.
   
3. Open up Ableton Live and make a new MIDI track. Drag Impulse on to the MIDI track. Impulse is located under ‘Instruments’ in ‘Live Devices’.
4. We need to navigate to the place we saved the samples. Use Live’s browser (on the left, named ‘File Browser 1′), and locate the folder.
    
5. For starters, I’ll drag ‘BD_RnB_SS2′ on to the first free slot in Impulse. BD is short for bass drum. The sound is a bit harsh for what I am going for, so I am going to turn Transpose (Transp) down by -2 semitones (st), dial the Volume to -9 dB, and apply a low-pass filter (LP 1). You accomplish this, by pressing the ‘Filter’ button, make sure that Mode is set to ‘LP 1′ and turn the Frequency down to 825 Hertz (Hz). I also turn the Resonance (Res) to its’ minimum, 0.30.
   
6. For my snare, I’ll drag in ‘SD3_Modem’ and turn the volume to -3 dB. Next up I’ll add a clap sound, named ‘Clap’, and set the volume at -2 dB.
   
7. In the next 3 slots, I’ll load in some effects. I’ve chosen ‘SIGNAL’, ‘Tu3′ and ‘Tu’. I pan ‘SIGNAL’ slightly to the left (24L), and turn the volume down to -10 dB. Basically, I used the same procedure for ‘Tu3′, though I pan it to the right (23R), and dial the volume in on approx. -7 dB. I transpose ‘Tu’ up by 8 semitones, and set the volume at -12 dB.
   
8. We are now left with 2 empty slots. I am going to fill one of them with a hihat; The sample I’m using is named ‘Hat’. I find the hihat a bit too deep and harsh, so I turn the Transpose up by 4 semitones, Stretch down to -16% (this will make the sample slightly shorter, using a time stretching technique), Decay down to 120 milliseconds (ms) and Volume to -7 dB. I also throw in a low-pass filter (LP 1) at approx. 9.5 kHz to take off some treble.
   
9. All we need now is our last effect ‘“ Let’s use ‘Crash2_modem’. By itself, this sample does not sound very good. I am going to transpose it and make it shorter, controlled by gate (this means that when the drum note for this sample in the drum editor stops, the gate will cut off any of the remaining sample material that has not yet been played back. It makes us able to create a much ‘sharper’ release with this sample). Here is the parameter values I used: Start: 15 ms, Transpose: 7 st, Stretch: 48%, Decay: 9.14 ms, Volume: -21 dB. Remember to press the button that reads ‘Trigger’ so that it displays ‘Gate’ instead. This enables the gate function.
   
10. All we need now is a beat to play back on our new drum kit! I’ve chosen a electro-inspired beat I thought fit for these sounds.
    
11. Finally, I’m going to use a Compressor to get a bit more consistency in volume. I set the Threshold at -19 dB and Output -5.6 dB.
    

Enjoy your new drum kit! You can drag the Impulse instrument back up in your browser and create a preset you can use at another time.

Download this tutorial as a PDF

Listen to these tracks to see what you will be creating in this tutorial:

Layered Bass:

Layered Chord Synth:

By Daniel Rothmann (T7)

Introduction

At some point in your career of music-making you might encounter the problem that your synthesizers just aren’t sufficient for creating sounds big or fat enough for your tracks. This could, for example, be a really heavy bass or a big lead synth. Luckily, there is a technique of achieving these sounds. That technique is layering.

What layering is all about is pretty obvious, yet many electronic producers fail to apply it to its full potential. In essence, layering is “stacking” synths on top of each other, having them produce different sounds to more precisely achieve output in the areas of spectrum you desire. Let’s say, for instance, you want to produce a really heavy bass sound. This could consist of a sub-bass (clean sinus waves at low frequencies); a middle consisting of distorted saw waves with some filter modulation and possibly a 3^rd synth playing high octaves to the middle waves. Very few synths come with more than 2-3 oscillators (the oscillator is the component of a subtractive synthesizer that produce raw waves from which sound is built), and in this particular case, we will need 5-6 or more. That is why we will need to layer our synthesizers to produce the sound we’re looking for.

Method

Layering can be achieved in a number of ways: The first, and (possibly) most obvious, is to put 2-3 keyboard players next to each other, playing the same melody on different synthesizers. Naturally, this is a very imprecise and probably inefficient method of achieving the sound you want.

Fortunately, the modern day computer has made an unlimited number of totally synchronized keyboard players and an almost unlimited number of synthesizers available for us. The most basic way to layer synths on a computer audio sequencer is to simply create a number of different tracks with different synths on them and insert the same melody on each track. This can consume some time though, and thus we have virtual instruments that can contain (or combine) several synthe­sizers on the same track. This makes us able to play all our different synths via the same keyboard and adjust parameters on all of them by turning one knob. This can be particularly useful when you want to make modulations to the filter cutoff, creating a sweep effect. In order for the effect to be achieved, all filter cutoff knobs must be turned at the same time.

I’m going to show you an example of how you can utilize smart layering in Propellerheads Reason using Reasons Combinator component when producing a big bass sound. This is possible in many audio sequencers – Ableton Live sports the Instrument Rack which has similar features.

Build a big bass using Reason’s Combinator

For this tutorial you will need to have a copy of Propellerheads Reason 3 (or newer). I am going to show you, step by step, how to program a big bass sound using Combinator. You will also need to have some basic knowledge on how to operate Reason and how to program synthesizers.

1. First of all, open up Reason and create a Combinator
2. As you can see, Combinator opens with an initial patch with no containing instruments. This is okay. We’ll start by clicking in the black void inside the Combinator and create a line mixer. I have also composed a small melody in the sequencer to preview my sound.
   
3. Create your first Subtractor. We’ll program it to serve as the sub, setting the two oscillators as sinus, in the octave you wish. Try to set the octave appropriate to the melody you have created, so that it is as deep as possible without being inaudible. Name this synth “sub”.
   
4. Now, create the next synth. We’ll call this one “middle” and we’re going to make it pro­duce a harsher sound using saw waves. I made a slightly detuned sound, ranging in 2 octaves. I added fuzz distortion (Scream 4) and some EQ to take some bass away (it was interfering with the sub). Notice that the melody plays back on both synths at once.
   
5. I’ve continued the process and created 2 additional synths: Square L and R. These are basi­cally the same (except that slightly detuned from each other). They add a bit more power to the middle spectrum. Square L is panned left and Square R is panned right.
   
6. As you can see, I’ve made a few changes to the levels on the mixer in order to get the balance I want.
   
7. Here comes the cool part! We’re going to program the knobs on the Combinator so that we can modulate some of the parameters the synthesizers have in common. First off, let’s make a frequency knob. Untoggle the “show devices” button, and press the “show pro­grammer” button. Here you’ll see an overview of the instruments. Aren’t you happy you named all your synths now?
8. Click the device number 3, named “Middle”. Now, on the right where it says “modulation routing”, press “target” where it says rotary 1 and choose “filter freq”. You have now as­signed rotary 1 (knob 1) to modulate the filter of you middle synth! If you want, you can name the rotary “frequency”.
9. Now do the same thing for Square L and R, assigning their filter freq to rotary 1. Please note that if you have followed my synth programming precisely, you will need to assign ro­tary 1 to “filter2 freq” since I have assigned a notch filter on filter 1 and a regular low-pass on filter 2. We want to modulate the regular low-pass filter.
   
10. Now do the same thing over again, but this time, assign “filter res” to rotary 2 on the respective synths.
11. Save you preset! Congratulations, you have created a huge bass sound in 10 simple steps! In total we needed 8 oscillators for our sound, which is why we had to use layering.

Produce a “chord synth” using Ableton Live 7’s Instrument Rack

Inspired by Kraftwerk’s “Tour De France Etape 1“, I’m going to demonstrate how to build a layered preset that produces big chords from a small amount of input notes. It basically consists of 4 oscillators; 2 square waves with a 7 semitone interval between them, and 2 “resonated noise waves” panned to each side respectively, to generate some depth in the chord.

1. Open up Ableton Live and create a new MIDI channel. From your Live Device browser, drag an “Instrument Rack” to the channel.
2. Drag an “Analog” device into the Instrument Rack where it says “Drop MIDI effects, audio…”.
3. We’re going to program a patch consisting of 2 square waves – the first one will play the actual note we’re pressing on our keyboard or sequencer, and the other one will play a note displaced by 7 semitones (a perfect fifth). I’m going to program mine to have a fast attack, long decay and no sustain. Furthermore, I’ll assign a filter envelope so that the sound will slowly “close itself” as it decays into silence.
   
4. At this point, we want to add another Analog synth to play our “resonated noise” sound. Press the “Show/Hide Chain List”. From here you can get an overview of all the instruments featured in your Instrument Rack. At the moment we only have the one Analog synthesizer we added.
   
5. Add another Analog synthesizer. This part of the patch is a bit trickier to program. Basically what I want to do, is make two noise oscillators panned to each side (left and right). I want to put a powerful resonant filter on them, and have the keyboard key decide the filter frequency. This means that the Analog synth will produce a resonant tone that follows the key that is played through the Live sequencer.
   
6. I’ve turned down the volume on the resonant noise synth to make the patch sound more balanced. Now, put in some simple chords to listen to your patch. I’ve chosen a | Cm | Gm | B^b | Fm | chord progression.
   

7. Now that the patch itself is in order, let’s assign some macros. You can do this very easily. Press the “Show/Hide Macro Controls” button on the left.  All you have to do is right click on a the parameter you want to assign to a macro button and choose “Map to macro…”. I’ve chosen to map my primary synth’s filter frequency to macro 1, the volume of the noise oscillators to macro 2 and some LFO Filter modulation controls to macro 3+4.
       
8. Now you can untoggle the “Show/Hide Chain List” and the “Show/Hide Devices” and have fun with your new combinated synth patch with easily accessible macro controls. If you would like to save your new preset, all you need to do is drag it up inside your instruments list (under Instrument Rack).
   

The tip of the iceberg

Please note that the features I’ve demonstrated in these tutorials are just the tip of the iceberg – there are many other useful elements of the layering devices to be discovered, including key zones, velocity zones and map modes.

Summary:

TouchOSC is an iPhone / iPod Touch application that lets you send and receive Open Sound Control messages over a Wi-Fi network using the UDP protocol. Using this program on your phone along with Osculator for Mac, you can control Ableton Live with your phone.

Requirements:

1. Wireless Router to create a wireless network for the iPhone to send OSC messages through
2. An iPhone with 2.0 or newer software
3. Purchase of TouchOsc and Osculator

Procedure:

First, launch OSCulator and Live.

We will have to configure Live so it will receive and send MIDI events with OSCulator.

In Live go in the Preferences, under the “MIDI Sync” tab and enable the Track and Remote columns for “OSCulator Out” and “OSCulator In” interfaces. This will enable us to record events and send control events to OSCulator as well.

TouchOSC configuration

Now, launch TouchOSC on your iPhone. Please make sure you have version 1.2 installed so automatic configuration will be enabled.

• Click on the button under “Network” and choose the option corresponding to OSCulator (see picture to the right). TouchOSC will automatically fill the fields required for the network communications.
• In the “Port (incoming)” field, enter 9000. This can be actually any port number you wish. 9000 is cool.
• From there your settings page should look like the second image from the top (your “Host” field can be different, due to network configuration differences).

• Select a layout, we will use “Beatmachine”.
• Click on the “Done” button.

We will configure the yellow slider so it can control the volume of the first track in Live:

• Touch the yellow slider to send an initial event.
• The event “/1/fader” should appear in the main window of OSCulator.
• In OSCulator, select “MIDI CC” as Event Type, and “cc0″ as Value.

Now, let’s tell Live we want to use this MIDI control change to control the volume fader of the first track. This procedure also works for any button or control in Live.

• Return to Live, and click on the MIDI button, located upper right. Live turns to MIDI Learn mode.
• Click on the volume fader of the first track.

• In TouchOSC, touch the yellow slider again. This will forward the event to Live, which will learn that we want to use the MIDI control change 0 to control the volume fader. A “1/0″ label is now displayed next to the volume fader, like this:

• Leave MIDI learn mode by click on the MIDI button upper right.
• You’re done!

If you click the volume fader in Live, you will notice OSCulator will automatically detect a MIDI message and will convert it to an OSC message that it sends to TouchOSC running on your iPhone.

That means that TouchOSC and Live are synchronized both ways.

1. Open up Ableton Live, and use one of the the file browsers in the left panel to browse for some loops. This works great for drum beats.
2. Drop several loops into their own audio tracks. Let’s start with 4 or 5 for now.
3. Double click on one of the clips and you’ll see a waveform display at the bottom of the screen. To the lower left of the waveform is a tiny “E” buttom, which shows you then Envelope Editor. Click that, and then click the now-visible Volume button (right under the Transpose button).
4. Now right-click on the waveform to choose the grid size. Select any resolution you want (1/8 or 1/16 is a good start) and press Ctrl + B or Cmd + B to turn on the pencil, and start drawing on the volume envelope. This is a great way to take out parts of drum beats that you don’t like. Try leaving just the kick or just the snare , or maybe just the hi-hats.
5. If you want to isolate just the hi-hats, another way to do this is to add an EQ and cut the low frequencies. Another fun thing to do is mess with the transpose envelope to pitch certain hits up or down.

Keep doing this to all of the loops/clips. Now when you play them together simultaneously, you should have a drum beat that is a mashup of many different loops.

6. Now if you want to record all these beats together to create a single loop, the easiest way to do this is to create a new audio track and make sure the “I-O” button on the right is on. Now turn monitor to “off” to avoid any feedback issues, then change the “Audio From” to “Master”. Arm the track with the red button at the bottom of this audio track, make sure all your tracks are playing, and then click record (either in the session view or the arrangement view). Let it loop once or twice then stop recording. Now you should have a clip that is a recording of your mashup beat.

Listen to this audio example made with Live’s Arpeggiator and NI Massive:

Step 1: From the Live Device Browser, open “MIDI Effects”. then open “Arpeggiator” and drag an arpeggiator preset into a new midi channel. Rename this channel to “Arpeggiator” (Ctrl + R for PCs or Cmd + R for macs)

Step 2: From the Plug-in Device Browser, drag a VST/AU plugin of your choosing into the midi channel alongside the MIDI arpeggiator. I prefer Native Instruments’ “Massive” plugin, which has great analog-style waveforms for rich, punchy sound.

Step 3: Arm the arpeggiator track and begin playing notes to feed the MIDI arpeggiator. When you’re ready to record, click one of the record buttons in the Captured Arp session channel to begin recording the output of the arpeggiator. You can use your computer’s keyboard as a midi keyboard (as long as the Computer Midi Keyboard button in the upper right corner  of the application is switched on). When you’re finished playing, click the red play button to stop recording.

Step 4: Create a new midi channel. I’ve named it “Captured Arp”. This channel will be used to record the output of the arpeggiator.  Change the  “Midi From” to “1 – Arpeggiator” (channel 1)

Step 5: Click the record button in a blank clip in the new midi channel as the arpeggiated clip you just recorded is playing. Click again to stop when finished recording.

Step 6: Congratulations, you’ve just recorded arpeggiated notes. Now you can double click on the new midi clip to edit the notes. Click the “Fold” button to only see the notes which were played by the arpeggiator. This makes it easier to use the arrow keys to move midi notes around, it will sound good no matter where you move the notes, because it will always move around in whichever scale you were playing

View movie

If you aren’t confident enough to record melodies from a MIDI keyboard or even your computer’s keyboard (a nice feature in Live for when you’re on the road with no MIDI controller), I find that the easiest way to write melodies with the pencil tool (Command + B for mac users, Ctrl + B for windows users) is to write in your melodies step by step. If you recall the formulas for major in tones (W = whole step, H = half step) (W W H W W W H) and minor (W H W W H W W), then you can use the Fold feature of Live’s clip view to hide the notes that are not included by one of these formulas. Notice in the first image, we have one octave of notes stacked up on top of each other in two different scales, F major and F minor.

All we need to do is create one of these stacks in a MIDI clip, and then duplicate it once or twice. Just select all the notes, then hold down option (mac) while dragging the notes up one octave. This should create a duplicate of your notes, but transposed up one octave. Do this again for the octave below. Now when you click the “Fold” button located at the top left of the clip view, all notes that are not in the clip are hidden. Note in this second image that at the very left, there is a stack of notes that form the scale of F minor. After that, I randomly double clicked to create new notes all over the grid. I set my synthesizer’s polyphony to 1 so that it can only play one note at a time. So no matter what notes I drew, they were all in key. As long as you have the fold view enabled, you can now draw notes anywhere and it will still sound pretty decent.

After creating a melody, you may want to turn this into a progression. Note the third image to the right, use it as a reference for the following instructions.

1. Turn on the launch view (it’s the button with an L on it). Set the Follow action to occur at 2 bars (see image for reference)
2. Duplicate your newly written melody (Cmd + D or Ctrl + D)
3. In the duplicated clip, select all of the notes, make sure the fold button is turned off, and hit the down arrow key twice. This transposes the whole melody down a whole step
4. Duplicate the clip again, and move the notes down two steps again.
5. You should now have a nice melodic progression. When you play the clips in the session view, the launch mode will automatically play the next clip in the track after 2 bars. In the audio demo below, I set the final clip to 4 bars just to make it a little more interesting