Things we covered: some DJing tips, more about controllers, an intro to Quartz Composer and Video, and Effects in Ableton.
DJing Tips for Ableton we talked about:
1. Work Vertically. Al and I don't go more than 4 tracks wide, and we work our way down (and up) when we are performing sets. And Group stuff that sounds good together so you don't have to hunt around much.
2. You can drag your clips in the clip view back into your file browser, and Ableton will remember those clips as is - ie, specific loops, the stop/start marker, etc. That way you don't have to set it every time. You can save loops that work well and then recall them anytime. You can also drag and drop groups of clips that mix well together, and bring those in to any project in the future, or even during a live set on the fly.
3. Use meaningful names. It's easy to forget which clip is what, so useful naming helps. Name the intros, the choruses, and even use lyrics out of the song to remind you what the vocals say. You can use your own naming convention, such that D can mean drums, and B can mean Bassline, and C means chorus, etc.
4. More on warping - other tips: turn off that metronome once in a while and rock your body to the beat just like you're on the dance floor. Your body moves with the beat and you'll be able to pluck out that one in your head because you'll feel it. When you've located a "1", move any numbered marker there, right click and set it to your 1.1.1. If the marker doesn't move (because of anchors on either side), double click it to yellow and it will move. Next, right click again and say "warp from here straight". Adjust your next few bars, then hop to bar 30 or so and check there, and then check and align near the end.
With some hip-hop, it's easier to pick up the 2nd and 4th beats per bar. You can then use those markers (the X.2 and X.4) to line up those 2nd and 4th beats and it works just as well. So, what is the 2nd and 4th beat in hip-hop? Usually the beat you clap your hands to (a snare). Listen to the clip: Hip-hop hooray (clap) hooo (clap) heyyyyy (clap) Hoooo (clap). etc. It's easier to hear that sometimes.
Ableton Effects
Al went through some of the most useful effects. You can also experiment with the "Audio Effect Rack" (the first category under the folder Audio Effects) and the "Performance & DJ" presets, which Ableton has provided as go-to effects for DJs. Some of them are hit and miss, and mostly based on the core effects we covered in class.
1. Your workhorse - the Auto Filter. Toggle between high, low and band pass and move those cut-offs (the frequency that marks what passes and what doesn't). The Q value is resonance, and it is the the sharpness of the "wall" of the filter. The higher Q value, the flatter the wall, but some frequencies get boosted and the sound changes. This is fine, and sounds good most of the time. You can mix in and out songs just by sweeping this filter, ie, taking the bass out of one song with a high-pass filter moving to the right, while bringing in a new track with a widening high-pass filter moving to the left. Experiment to get the feel. If there's any one effect you'll need when DJing, it's this one.
2. 8 band and 3 band EQing. You can use these to isolate or accentuate vocals, drums or instruments. For the 3-band EQ, you have kill switches like some DJ mixers. The Auto Filter above can replace the banded EQs for the most part.
3. Chorus - makes it sound like 2-3 people are singing instead of one.
4. Flanger - a time based filter that mixes two signals, delaying one slightly and gives you a metallic tube-y sound.
5. Redux - Decimation in bits and or sampling. Sampling decimation gives you a video-gamey simplicity sound. Bit reduction increases the noise, so it sounds like a bad radio channel with a lot of static. Again, these may sound great some times and horrible other times. It can be highly sample dependent.
7. Filter Delay - I like this one. There are 3 band pass filters, with delay and amount of feedback. The effect is a cool, in-sync echo-ing. To get longer echos, increase the feedback. If you use this in send and return, you can take the Return volume up and down and have a cool trailing effect.
8. Ping-pong - similar to filter delay, it's a left-right delay juggler synced on the beat. The beats are divisible into 16th notes. Play with those numbers to get a feel of the effects.
9. Reverb - Effectively, how big a space do you want your music to sound like? When you hear music indoors, the sound bouncing off the walls adds a long tail to the music so it sounds like it's prolonged. The bigger the enclosed space, like a temple or church, typically the greater reverberation. It's all the latent echoes you hear dissipating that cause this phenomenon. Sometimes it's good to add a little reverb to live vocals to give it some realness.
Hooking up MIDI and other hardware to use with Live
One of the coolest things about this class is Laptop DJing without the laptop. To do that, we use controllers, which really can vary in size, shape, function and usefulness.
Controllers come in two flavors - MIDI and HID. MIDI devices we've covered - you can edit the MIDI map in Ableton once you've plugged your device in. Make sure you've gone to your Live Preferences and told Live that remote and track are lit "on". That's easy enough.
Next, what about non-MIDI controllers? These are things like Wii controllers and joysticks. These controllers are called HID devices, for "Human Interface Device" devices. As long as it has a USB connector, it's most likely usable.
We focused on doing this on Macs because Mac OS comes with free software called Quartz Composer that helps us use HID devices. PCs are a whole different ballgame and we're looking into it. But for now, let's talk Quartz Composer, or QC.
Essentially, QC allows you to detect an HID input and translate it to MIDI. When you have QC running, the system can interpret signals from your HID device and present them as MIDI outputs to Live for mapping. It's that simple. Hooking up HID controllers, like the Wii drums we had in class, is something few if any DJs are doing. If you do this, you're truly at the vanguard of hi-tech DJing. QC can also work with video, and you can lump effects on that video synced to your music or hardware inputs.
Getting started: A tutorial to install QC here. Also, VJ Shakinda, a VJ from the Ireland has 4 more videos on QC called an Irishman's Guide to Quartz Composer. You can check them out here.
And from Al, a brief summary of what he covered of QC in class:
Here are some steps to get back to where we were on Saturday:
1) Drag a Movie into Quartz Composer. That will create a "Movie Loader" patch with the path set correctly to point to the movie you dragged in (the one labeled "Ms" in my picture below).
2) Open the "Patch Creator" and find the "Billboard" patch. Drag that into your project. The Billboard patch is what actually draws an image to the Viewer. If you want to, you can change the "Width" of the Billboard patch to make the image bigger.
3) Connect up your movie. Your Image output from your Movie should be the Image input to your Billboard.
4) Find the "MIDI Controllers Receiver" patch and drag that into your project. If you don't know which MIDI controller you actually want to use (by number), you can learn it. Once you've dragged in the patch, select it and choose "Patch Inspector" from the Toolbar (or hit -2) - that will give you some settings for the patch. Choose "Learn Controller to Observe" and twiddle your knob - the right controller should show up as an output from the patch.
5) Decide how you want your MIDI controller to modify your image. Here are a few ideas:
a) Enable: The easiest thing you can do (but not the most interesting) is to hook your Controller to the "Enable" of your billboard. If you do this, any positive value from your controller will mean your movie is visible, but if your controller is twisted to 0, the image will be hidden.
b) Effects: Another interesting thing you can do with a controller is modify some kind of Effect. There are tons of effects, but I will illustrate with a Gaussian Blur. In the example below, I am using the MIDI controller to modify the Radius of a Blur patch that I've placed in between the movie and the billboard. MIDI controller values are always 0-1, so you may want to use something like the "Mathematical Expression" patch to get larger values (In my example below, I've multiplied the value by 50.) Click to enlarge graphic below.
c) Triggering: If you have a movie that you want to retrigger everytime you hit a controller (like a pedal), you can use the controller to
reset the time on the patch to 0 with every hit. By default, the Movie Loader patch will play at a constant rate - if you want to retrigger it, you will need to tell the Movie Loader patch to get its "Timebase" externally. Control click on the Movie Loader to change its "Timebase" to "External" - that will give you a "Patch Time" input. Hook it up as follows (click to see full pic below):
Additional resources: Quartz Compositions
Also, if you find more tutorials yourself on YouTube or elsewhere, please let us know in the comments.
-G
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