Lately, I’ve been making a lot of aggressive bass sounds with lots of high end buzz and fuzz. For some saturation insanity in your basses, Live’s Saturator used in Waveshaper mode is pretty awesome. What scares folks away from the Waveshaper tends to be the 6 boxes in the lower right that come to life […]
THE BEST FREE COMPRESSOR
One of my absolute favorite plug-ins is free, and you’re just plain crazy if you don’t have it. The Rough Rider, brought to you by Audio Damage: If you’ve got a small plug-in collection (or even a big one), you’ll find that this sucker is a fantastic compliment to Live’s built-in compressor. While Live’s Compressor […]
RACK THAT FUZZ!
When I get crazy with the Saturator, I usually don’t even bother trying to get the wet/dry balance right. Instead, I set the Saturator to 100% wet, and use a wet/dry rack instead. This makes it much easier to get the levels right in my experience. It also offers more sophisticated sound shaping capabilities. For […]
SUPA-TRIGGA: ONE BUTTON GLITCHA
In the tracks that I use for my vocal and old time music samples, I use the excellent free plug-in SupaTrigga, which slices up audio and then rearranges, reverses, slows down or silences the slices based on various probabilities. I’ll momentarily turn it on with a MIDI button for a blast of glitchy goodness. I […]
SUPA-TRIGGA: THE RACK
Like pretty much everything I use in performance, my Supa-Trigga lives in a Rack. There are two particular reasons for this. The first reason is that SupaTrigga is a buffer-based effect, meaning that it has to have a bit of audio stored in memory before it can begin processing it. This means that it won’t […]
DJ SAMPLER
My solution for mixing between two clips located on the same track (as mentioned in the previous tip), is to capture a 1 bar loop using a rack that lives in the Master track – sorta based on a sampler you might see in a DJ mixer. The rack has two chains – an empty […]
STORM GATE: SECRET WEAPON
Man, I’m not going to have any secrets left by the end of this year. Sigh. Another way I mix up and mess up my hobo tracks during a performance is to rhythmically gate them using another groovy free plug in: StormGate1. There’s a paid version called StormGate3 that has more features, but it seems […]
STORM GATE: GETTING THE GRID RIGHT
Understanding the grid on the StormGate can be a little tricky at first. The key thing to understand is that the basic unit of measurement it uses is the 1/8 note. Take a look at the Steps section: If you play with the numeric control at the top, you’ll find that it doesn’t affect the […]
STORM GATE: THE RACK
For the StormGate rack that I use in my performance set, the concept is simple: have a single knob that can be used to sweep through a variety of patterns. First, you’ll need to program a series of patterns of course. I suggest creating 6-8 patterns for starters. With a manageable number of patterns, you […]
PERFORMANCE RACK COMPRESSION
For a variety of effect racks I’ve built, I’ve found that building in some compression is quite useful. For example, when I first built the StormGate rack, I found that it sounded good on some material and far less so than others. In particular, there’s was lots of material where the result was not nearly […]
