I’m gonna back up for a minute and share a little more about Group tracks. Some basics, and some more interesting stuff as well… To create the group, just highlight several tracks and use the Group command: After you do this, each track that was routed to Master will now be routed to Group. However, […]
PRODUCING FOR THE GIG
Lately, I’ve been doing a fair amount of “speed production” while on the road. This just means producing tracks with only my live set in mind. Rather than try to create something that develops over 4-7 minutes and is ready to release, I’ll create material that works really well for two minutes during a performance. […]
REFLECTIONS FROM THE ROAD
Hey everyone! As you know, the summer schedule has been a bit hectic and the tips have been coming on a somewhat more erratic schedule than usual. Well, hopefully that will improve a bit over the coming weeks…I played my last date of the tour on friday (which included a tag-team workshop with the unstoppable […]
“SAMPLE” MIDI
Composing using MIDI effects goes far beyond just generating some random notes. There are all sorts of things you can do with Arpeggiator, Scale, Note Length, etc. However, as mentioned yesterday, you often end up in a situation where you want to keep some but not all of the material that gets generated. In some […]
MIDI FILTRATION
If you get deeper into generating parts through creative randomization, you’ll find yourself sometimes wondering how to get rid of certain nasty notes. There are all sorts of techniques for taking parts that have been generated through random, or strange improvisational techniques and turning them into musically coherent material. We’ve already discussed one of the […]
MICROTONALIZE IT
We tend to assume that the relationship between the MIDI notes sent into a device and the sounds coming out to be relatively fixed. But in fact, depending on the instrument you’re working with, you can customize the behavior of the instrument to ignore note input completely (and always output the same note) or scale […]
THE ALTERNATOR
So, you’ve probably noticed by now that all of my suggestions for Random are tending towards the percussion side of things. The prior tip was a slight deviation, but so far I’ve been focusing in that area because getting random pitches to do things that are musically coherent opens a whole other can of worms. […]
RANDOM OCTAVES
Another fun way to use Random is to get it to make more dramatic changes, but do it less frequently. For example, try creating some synthetic percussion with Operator (or something else, the important thing is that it not be in a Drum Rack so it responds normally to pitch). Now, program a simple part […]
THE GHOST SHAKER
Spooky, I know. Think you can handle it? Here’s a fun tweak to the setup in the prior tip: All I’ve done here is bump up the Choices to 4. This means that when a random note is chosen, it will sometimes trigger an empty pad: This will interrupt the flow with a brief pause […]
THE SHAKER VARIATIONS
So, here’s one practical use for Random. We begin with a simple MIDI clip: …that’s triggering a Drum Rack with a Random in front of it: The MIDI clip only triggers the first pad (shk1) directly. The other three shakers only get triggered when a random note gets generated. With Chance set to 75%, Random […]
