I really like MIDI editing in Live. Over time, I’ve developed a workflow for programming MIDI that is faster and smoother than I’ve ever achieved in any other environment. I create a lot of parts by drawing them directly into the MIDI editor. In fact, I’ve made entire songs without ever touching a MIDI controller. […]
SLOPPY CLAPS
Since we’ve been discussing some issues related to Simpler and velocity, I thought I’d show you a rack I made for a remix I’m working on. There’s a section of this track where we need a really loose sounding hand clap section. At the moment, it’s not practical for me to get a room full […]
SLOPPIER CLAPS
So, once I start messing around with intentionally making things sloppy or uneven I find that it’s something I can play around with forever and keep discovering things. Here are a couple of other tricks to keep things loose in the clap track. A little bit of random panning in a few of the clap […]
KICK THAT KICK
Thanks to everyone who joined up on the Hobotech Facebook page yesterday! If you haven’t done that yet, there’s now a widget in the right column of this site that will makes it one click away. If you’re a fan of these tips, please take two seconds and join up. When we get to 1000 […]
KICK THE MIDS
Yesterday we took a look at filtering and layering to transform a kick drum sample. Today we’ll fill in the midrange a bit and look at a couple of other pieces of technique. I’ve duplicated the chain again, so now the Rack looks like this: The purpose of this chain is to add midrange punch […]
KICK THAT SNARE
Alright. In the name of silly sound design experiments, today I’ll make a snare drum out of the same kick sample I started with a couple of days ago. I’m not saying that you’ll necessarily want to do this in real life – just showing how flexible every bit of sound in your sample library […]
ONLY THE BEST
Since we’ve spent the last few days majorly tweaking a sample, I want to take a minute to remind you (and me!) that the purpose of selecting a small group of samples is to get up and running quickly when creativity strikes. Hopefully, you’re now feeling secure in the knowledge that it’s possible to shape […]
SYNTHETIC PERCUSSION
Another quick and easy thing to do with The Best Preset Ever is to make synthetic percussion. Start out by making the volume envelope of oscillator A fast and percussive: You’ll probably want to crank up Operator’s volume control at this point (it’s in the lower right hand corner). Now, get oscillator B into the […]
A LITTLE BUZZED
Here’s a simple trick to get a little glitch into your sampled drums. Set up Simpler like this: What you’re seeing here is a snare hit with a short loop at the end. Instead of having a natural decay, the hit will buzz at the end. First, make sure that the Loop switch is turned […]
A LITTLE MORE BUZZED
The interesting thing about setting loops in Simpler is that the Loop parameter is specified as a percentage of the sample’s Length. In other words, if Loop is set to 20%, you’ll always be looping the last 20% of the sample regardless of what Length is set to. This means that adjusting Length adjusts both […]
