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Victor Stone's personal site. It's just a tonal thing. |
OK, assume I’ve done all the Get Your Remix On and Bring It On rah-rah stuff — just know that I plan to get real serious about RemixFight!. Watch for my uploads in the next contest as my nom-de-dj fourstones.net.
(How did I not know about this? — er, probably because nobody invited me.)
Speaking of tutorials: This site looks pretty cool for FL Studio (Fruity Loops) uses.
Steps for using Live as a ReWire host to FL Studio (Fruity Loops) slave.
Cakewalk/SONAR guru Craig Anderton has released a book with Wizoo called SONAR 3 – Mixing & Mastering. (That’s mixing, not re-mixing.) The introductory chapter on mixing is available in PDF format here. Some of it reads pretty corny and obvious with sprinklings of that down-home flavor (I’m guessing) SONAR users eat up:
The engineer is the one at the session who doesn’t drink, smoke, talk much or complain, and is responsible for translating the producer’s needs into a technological solution.
Despite this, there is interesting stuff buried in there.
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As the The Screem (assume that I’ve done yet another link to yet another Dean Yeeeha! remix) fades into Americana folklore, it is interesting to note that the one creative application that actually stared life on the PC and went to Apple (who knew the road even went in that direction??) has caught Mac users by storm and created such excitement. The prospect that you could take an audio sample, mix it with a beat and create a “song” in minutes is being treated like so much revelation in the mainstream media. I can’t blame them. When ACID came out six years ago it changed my life for the better (and then once again for the worse when it released 4.0 last year).
The fact that the same person seems to have written ACID and GarageBand (Chris Moulios) and that the two applications work almost identically the same… well there’s nothing I can say that doesn’t sound like BTDT. So Welcome! Apple users and mainstream press to the wonderful world of ACID GarageBand!!! |
For the last year and a half my preferred way of composing a mix was to use FL Studio (nee Fruity Loops) as my main mixing surface. Unfortunately FL doesn’t have any time or pitch stretching so when I need that functionality I call up ACID, stretch the clips I need, render them out and load them into my FL project. The recent release of FL Studio 4.5 supports ReWire so I decided to take another looks at Live since it is a ReWire host. (ACID is also a ReWire host but the interaction with FL has been tenuous for me. I am being generous. It’s been flaky to the point of unusable.)
In order to compare ACID and Live, I decided to use a pre-existing long original track and try to add a new beat to it. The end result of both trials are extremely similar (strikingly so) which led me to focus the comparison on the productivity and user interface differences between in Live and ACID. What follows is the result of that investigation. (I’ll get to the actual stretching algorithmic differences in another article.)
Peter Gabriel (used to be my hero) and Brian Eno (always my hero) are launching a musician’s union specifically aimed at artists with downloadable tunes but heavy on digital rights management (i.e. encryption for money).
We’ll see. Anything is better than what’s going on now.
Also see Brad’s very optimistic take on DRM. Personally I worry that big industry is winning and the pipe for sharing music is getting choked off.
I have never seen a discount on Ableton’s Live. It lists for $400 and sells on the street for $300. Digitraxx is selling Ableton Live for $269. (The sale ends today.)
This might just do it for me.
I walked into Blue Note Music on Telegraph in Berkeley the other day. I was there to get a 1/4″ to RCA adapter chord. With this chord I planned to plug my Behringer mixer into the M-Audio Omni Studio and finally do some recording off the CDj.
They didn’t have the chord.
Instead I walked out with an amp like the one pictured here, the Fender “Blues Jr.” The price of the amp was considerably more money than the chord would have cost.
Still, the amp was a recent return by someone with back problems (it’s not that heavy) and was therefore over 20% less than it is typically priced. It is in perfectly new shape with 4 years and 9 months left on the factory warranty. It’s pure tubes. It’s pure beauty. It was lust at first sight.
CDj’ing will have to wait. I’m going to be a hippie for just a little longer.
It was an impulse buy but it’s only the second amp I’ve bought since I overpaid for that Marshall at Guitar Center on Hollywood in LA in 1977. I treated that amp like shit but this one is different. I’m going to be very, very good to this one because, apparently, it can kill you.
I’m currently working on a feature for using Ableton Live and FL Studio (Fruity Loops) together. On the way there I tripped over the following gem in the Live docs:
…which is good to know because after you give a music software company $300 for a mixer app you want to know for certain that you can, you know… produce silence.
