Finished this jam up recently. I really like slicing up live takes of MDUW and building up tracks from them in Live.
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That is awesome man! Seriously!
really liked this track - can you explain how you did it, live takes into the ableton and then what?
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Hi sounds really good… can you share some light about the technique or the MDUW machines you`re using
Thanks
Another vote for learning how you did this. Great track!
Thanks everyone for listening.
So here’s a bunch of detail on how I made this track. I’m glad you’ve asked, because it gives me a reason to share the workflow that I’ve figured out after years of not really understanding how to use hardware and a laptop together beyond using the laptop as a glorified tape machine.
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The drums in this track come from a pattern I wrote on the MDUW last year. What I’ve been doing is writing stuff on the OT and MDUW and jamming it out, recording 5-8 minute takes into Live. Sometimes I’ll multi-track out, but a good mix in the MD processed well will go a long way unless you want to do stuff with reverbs & fx automation on individual voices.
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Once I’d recorded the drums I did a pass through my modular running filters, resonators, & a frequency shifter to get some interesting textures out. At one point I was so into the sound of it I nearly just called the track finished there. It’s still a great stem, I just did a bounce of it that you can have a listen to here.
http://soundcloud.com/okpk/fln-tnght-raw-drums -
I took the long take of drums and started chopping it up into sections and giving it a bit more of a structure 16/16/16 feel. I like the dynamics of a live performance, but I am not practiced enough to produce really tight structures just by improvising.
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With the drums laid out, I started writing around them in live. You can see from the pics of the session that there’s quite a bit going on. I’ve augmented the drums from the MDUW with some stereo samples and a bit of sweetening (120hz thump layered with the kick etc). I don’t think that these things were necessary to make it sound good, but I’m going for a very polished, layered sound in my current work, where I think the raw audio would have been perfect for a rough, punchy warehouse vibe. When I play this stuff out live it’s much more like that.
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Synth work is all VSTs. I was probably inspired to write this the way I did because I’d recently bought Lush101, which is basically a Warp Records machine. You can drive it with one piece of midi that is feeding up to 8 parts multitimbral, that you send out to different busses, and then use automation to make it all move. Bass is Reaktor Lazerbass, which is still great. Otherwise it’s FXpansion Synthsquad for bread&butter, Waldorf Largo for wavetables, and AAS Electric for the piano breakdown. I like unexpected cello, so there’s some of that in there too. Clark does this great thing where he has these belter tracks that just kind of turn to vapour at the end with glorious pads, and I am fully going for that.
- Past all that, it’s the usual mix-mix-mix biz. Nothing too amazing there.
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For some reason that makes me smile. Like a cello is lurking behind a door waiting to jump out and surprise someone.
First off, great track! Really nailed that Clark/Warp vibe. Excellent arrangement and mix. No dead air in there at all.
I feel the same way about composing on these machines. Never have quite understood how to use them with Ableton. That is very tricky. As you mention, can take years of trial and error to find a good personal workflow. I’m glad you’re exploring and honing in on a good one.
Again, same here. I like to jam. I like watching all these YouTube jams. It’s great stuff. But I never feel comfortable releasing an unedited lengthy jam track myself. For some reason I have to have that timing down exactly like I want it. I admit, I’m probably just an OCD control freak and nobody gives a shit anyways, but it’s just a personal thing.
One of my recent tracks (Invisible) I used this method with the Rytm. Just edited a bunch of jam parts down in Ableton into a somewhat tight song structure. Even though I had to do extensive clip editing due to latency and sync issues, it still felt like a fairly quick and enjoyable arrangement process.
Do you have to deal with latency/timing/sync issues when chopping and arranging MD recordings in Ableton? I think if I were to use this method more often I’d have to pick up some sort of sync box to stay sane. Maybe an Expert Sleepers USAMO or something similar. (Hmmm. But, if I had one of these, and ultra-tight sync, I could keep the Rytm rather fluid while composing melodies with soft-synths - no need to pre-record all Rytm parts and then layer soft-synths over it. I guess that deserves a big “Duh!!!” 
)
Anyways, nice song! Thanks for the write-up too. I love to hear how other people work.
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Excellent ! Thank you for sharing this with us and making it a free track on bandcamp. Reading your workflow description made my day, so thanks again I suppose 
I recently ditched midi sync (someone on the OP1 forum suggested it a while back…) and now just manually sync stuff and record it in to Daw. Not sure why but I get a lot more done way quicker this way and feels more organic. Just switch on all my hardware throw a ton of ideas/sequences etc in to Daw tracks and then edit. Feels kind of like recording to multitrack tape again except quicker…
I thought I’d have issues with the timing but it’s fine most of the time, occasionally something just needs a little nudge left/right.
I guess it depends what music you’re doing tho. This kind of approach fits for me, overdubs/layers… might be problematic if you’re making super precise techno and want to record a long live improv on multiple units simultaneously, boxes might drift from each other over time etc…
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Great track, thanks for sharing your interestng workflow. Coincidentally I just this minute got an email about Chris’s new album coming in April, then arrived here and saw this. Spooky.
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great track
I’m with callofthevoid on the sync business, I will use Live for a clock, but if I need to get timing a particular way, I’ll go in and edit it by hand. I’ve got another track I’m finishing up where there’s a little click in a B2 kick drum from a sawtooth LFO modulating DIST, and the take has the feeling I want, so I’ve had to make 100s of edits…
This is what trips me up, when I’m doing my “dub techno-ish” music, I want to have the bass-line in Ableton sync up very accurately with the drums in the Rytm, and/or extra layers of drums in Ableton. Once I get that rhythm section down I will usually start adding stabs, pads, melodies etc. But if kick + bass are just a little bit off it totally kills the vibe.
Yes, this is my issue I guess. I would go ahead and simply record bits to audio (and have worked this way in the past of course) but for this dub-style method I am trying to get into, I would like to go back once the song is arranged and then jump around the room like an idiot, recording the automation/fx/performance using Push, DS1, Rytm Perf, knobs on MS20, TB-03, etc. I want synths and drums to change and morph through the entire song. So it would be harder to just record small clips and copy/paste.
I think I will try the USAMO or something similar. On goes the never-ending, but fun, workflow experimentation.
Anyways, don’t mean to pollute your thread, okpk. I apologize for rambling. Let’s get this thread back to the incredible work on your song…
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Cool. Can’t wait to hear it. If you’ve got the time and feel like sharing I’m sure we’d all love another workflow write-up on it when released! That sort of thing is invaluable I think. Cheers. 