Sampling is such a given in modern music that we probably don’t give it much thought these days – lifting a musical loop, breakbeat or even spoken word sample from someone else’s record is almost second nature to producers and has been commonplace since the explosion of sampling in the early 1980s.
TouchOSC is an app that allows control of our DAWs from our iOS device such as an iPad or iPhone via MIDI or OSC messages. It comes with preset interfaces for Ableton Live and Logic as well as having the functionality to design your own.
Parallel processing is a technique for mixing an effected version of a track with a dry version. This is particularly helpful when you want to process a sound but the plug-in doesn’t have a dry/wet knob or you want to be able to control the effected signal with additional effects, such as EQ, reverb etc.
One of my favourite plug-ins that comes bundled with Ableton Live is the Resonator. It’s a strange beast but essentially it’s a bit like oscillators that can be tuned independently and that react to the volume of whatever you put into it; it also has controllable decay, a dry/wet blend and a rudimentary filter.
I want to quickly have a look at this chord I stumbled across in Charles Mingus’s 1955 piece, Jump Monk, which can be found on the album, Mingus at the Bohemia.
I want to look at two songs. One is the 1959 ballad Naima taken from John Coltrane’s game changer Giant Steps, and the other is Erykah Badu’s Other Side of the Game, produced by Richard Nichols and The Roots, taken from her 1997 album, Baduizm.
Spectral analysers are a useful tool for helping to diagnose troublesome frequencies in your mix, weather it be low-end rumble, a pokey mid-range spike or a piercing high frequency.
There are numerous sample packs offering club-ready kick drums and this is by no means a bad thing. However, these might not always be suitable for your track.
The CAGED system is a method for quickly and logically learning all the potential chord inversions for the guitar’s fretboard. Ordinarily the basic shapes are taught to you and for playing in bands or basic accompaniment, this is fine.