Ableton 9 EQ Mixing Tip for Conflicting Instruments
Ableton 9 EQ Mixing Tip for Conflicting Instruments
As I dig deeper into Ableton 9, I find more and more ways to solve mixing problems to get better results. In this case I’ve come up with a way to solve EQ conflicts (fighting frequencies).
Conflicting EQs can happen in a mix when 2 or more parts are fighting for the same frequency. Examples of this can be the kick drum & bass, or vocals & lead parts.
When this happens you have a few choices. Get rid of one of the parts if it’s not completely necessary, pan parts to different locations, or use of reductive EQing.
In the video below I focus on reductive EQs. This involves finding the most important frequencies of each track with Ableton 9′s EQ8 effect. Since you can now see the frequency spectrum on your EQ, you can easily find the important fundamentals & reduce the levels in those areas.
Once that is dialed in, you can turn the EQ effect off on each track. Then when a conflict arises, you can simply copy the EQ of a certain track you want to hear better in your mix and paste it to the conflicting instrument.
Check out the video to see how easy this is:
Happy music making,
Jason
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MusicSoftwareTraining.com moves to Denver
MusicSoftwareTraining.com moves to Denver
For those of you who might be wondering why my posts have been a bit less frequent, it’s been due to my moving to Denver. There has been a lot of preparing, packing & all the other stuff that comes along with a big move. It’s certainly taken a toll on my music productivity & even though I have finally arrived here, there is still another month of this to be expected.
For the last 18 months or so I’ve been living in Iowa City, Iowa. It was a great college town with a slower pace of life than my previous residence in Southern California. The new environment has been quite a healing experience. I had to get use to cold weather, but it was worth it. While there, I backed off from DJing gigs & focused largely on music production & building up this site. I knew I’d get back into it later, but I felt the need to re-prioritize. It turned out to be a very productive time.
Here are some of the things I’ve been able to accomplish:
Creating the Ultimate Master Template
Introducing the Producer’s Playground
Posting a 12 step songwriting process in Ableton
Creating the Stutter Pad instrument
A complete update of my 1st Ultimate Ableton Tutorial Collection
Creating (and continuing to improve) my Partnership Program
Although it was tough to back off on live performance, I am really proud of the contributions I’ve been able to make in other ways. So although Iowa City didn’t offer a whole lot in terms of expanding as a performing artist, it still served a great purpose & allowed me to focus on the business side of things in a way I hadn’t previously been able to.
That said, I knew Denver was always part of the bigger plan. There is a great Ableton community both in Denver & Boulder which is not too far away. Denver is also the home of Beatport & clubs like The Church, Beta & the legendary Red Rocks. I’m sure I’m barely even scratching the surface here & I look forward to finding the hidden gems this area has to offer. If you are associated with booking electronic artists & DJs, have good promotion, great sound & think I’d be a good fit for your venue, definitely get in touch with me. I’ll be available in mid-late June.
So this is my 3rd day here & at the moment, the majority of my time is dedicated to finding a place to live & adapting to the traffic & clusterfuckery of the street layout. I’m most likely going to be setting up camp in the Capital Hill area. In the meantime, I’ll try to get more Ableton 9 & Push videos & posts up when I can. I don’t have any space for my studio at the moment, so i’ll be in minimalist mode until I am properly settled in to my new place. Your patience is appreciated.
What you can expect
Being back in a big city will have a lot of great advantages & I plan to connect with a lot more artists & share more tips, tricks, hacks & techniques that you can put to use right away. I’m sure I will come across many new insights from these new interactions. You can also expect more music out of me as well as more focus on DJing & live performance.
Max for Live will be making more appearances as well as I poke around further & discover how far that rabbit hole goes. Instead of bombarding you with every possibility, I’ll pull out the most useful tools & techniques I can.
Members & Partners can expect continued updates & more interaction over the coming months as I always push myself to create a better experience for you all. I’m always here listening to your feedback, comments & suggestions, so keep those coming.
I’m also planning to upgrade the website a bit, so if you are a wordpress guru, get in touch!
Wish me luck on finding the perfect place & expect to hear from me soon!
Happy music making,
Jason
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Write a song in 24 hours – Ableton Walkthrough
Write a song in 24 hours – Ableton Walkthrough
If you didn’t read my last post, I challenged myself to create a song from scratch & finish it within 24 hours. You can read my last post for all the guidelines but generally speaking, I built the song with only samples from other songs and audio content. I didn’t use any built in Ableton instruments, just the effects. Everything was done in the arrangement window.
As far as songwriting experiments goes, this really took me out of my regular process & got me thinking differently. The results were really different as well. I encourage you to try something similar & see how it works for you.
As promised, here is the video walkthrough of the 1st song I created during my 24 hour experiment.
Happy music making,
Jason
Over 30 Hours of streaming Ableton tutorials for just $7
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Write a song in 24 hours
Write a song in 24 hours
How long does it take you on average to make a song start to finish?
Do you have more unfinished loops and ideas than finished songs?
I certainly do. But I’m improving.
Often times, once we get into a habit of working a certain way, we start to believe that is just the way things are. If we take a long time, that’s just how we work. Now I am not knocking people who take a while to create something they are satisfied with, but I am challenging the thought that you couldn’t have created an equally impressive piece of work in a fraction of that time.
Being that I take longer than I like pretty often still, I created a challenge for myself that I would love for you to try as well.
The Experiment
So the goal was to create a 4 song E.P. derived from only songs that I spent 24 hours each on. Surprisingly, I came pretty damn close to reaching that goal. 3 of the songs were relatively finished within the set timeframe, while one just needs some arrangement tweaks.
I knew I had to approach my songwriting differently to successfully reach this time goal. I threw out 90% of the things that eat of time or create second guessing & mental blocks & focused on the 10% that was essential to working quickly & creatively. This isn’t to suggest you shouldn’t indulge in processes that take more time, but if you want to make a song in 24 hours, it’s important to set limits and guidelines.
The Rules:
I set up some rules that keep me from wasting time with the “too many options” syndrome. Here they are below:
1. No hardware of any kind. No hardware synths or effects. Everything was going to be done inside the box.
2. No soft synths, samplers, drum synths or any software instruments.
3. All content of the songs would come from other music or youtube/spotify content. Drums, bass, pads, fx, atmospherics etc.. No mind was paid to legality of use or even the quality of the sound. I just used what inspired me & tried to make it my own. I used screenflow to capture audio.
4. I allow myself to use internal effects to tweak the sounds, but nothing else (with Ableton, that’s plenty anyway). No max for live effects though.
5. All songs would be put together in the arrangement window using very basic tools: cut, copy, paste, duplicate, reverse, pitch shifting, half time, double time.
The Approach
With these rules in place I went at creating music in 24 hours. I really didn’t take much time with the sampling. In some cases, I had some sampling ideas in my head, but most if it was pretty random. By not having a clear idea of what I wanted to create in my head, I could just focus on what was in front of me. All of this saved a tons of time that I would have spent trying to dick around looking for the perfect sound of instrument.
I would start creating the song in bed at night on my laptop & would give myself until the following night to complete the song. Working in bed with headphones on put me in a more relaxed state of mind & allowed me to take more risks & break some rules. I was usually a bit tired when I started, so that kept me from second guessing things. I wanted to approach this with a childlike spirit. Less structure, more curiosity.
The Results
Since I gave myself no musical rules, I felt no pressure to be neat about my approach. I wasn’t creating changes every 16 bars if I didn’t feel like it. I was strictly going on vibe & since I had no genre in mind, I had no template to work with. I basically just assumed I would create an intro part, a main element, perhaps a change or softer element & an outro.
The results were completely unexpected and like nothing I have created before. I don’t want to judge it on better or worse than other stuff I’ve made, but it seems an inspired and spontaneous body of work.
Now that I hear the potential of these songs, I am going to give myself 24 more hours on each song to dial things in more, but this wouldn’t have even happened if I hadn’t set the goal, so I plan to create this way more often.
Here’s the 1st tune I created in 24 hours:
In my next post, I’ll walk you through my process in more detail.
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