Audition pre-record performance HERE

Live final performance HERE

I listened to both, one after the other trying not to analyse the vocal tuning too much. The first thing I realise is that overall the performance from the live final seemed to be much better than the pre-recorded and allegedly tampered with audition. Because Autotune can tune in real time, why the accusations only for the pre-recorded shows? The performance was so much better in the final so there’s more chance they were using it then than the audition anyway! Having said that, Autotune doesn’t cope well with vibrato and this big old bird loves a bit of vib. I put the improvement down to her being more relaxed and used to singing in front of an audience. I’m assuming there are endless rounds where everyone has to sing and each week one gets knocked out each week until just a few are left in the final. Does she sing the same song every single week?

Someone who can’t sing at all asked me if I could make them sound like a great singer using pitch correction software, and my reply was that I could probably make you sound 20% better almost immediately and if I was left with your lead vocal performance for a a few hours with Melodyne or in the old days Autotune in graphical mode (how tedious was that?), I could probably make you sound around 40% – 50% better. The point is that you have to be pretty good in the first place to sound great. Over the years I can probably count the amount of times I haven’t used Autotune on a vocal on one hand – from the very best in the business to the really bad ones. Of course, no names. The only reason I haven’t used it is when the artist insists that they don’t want it which is rare.

I analyse the pre-recorded audition for signs of Antares Autotune pitch correction software and notice that a lot of the longer notes tend to fluctuate in pitch at the tail end of the note when she begins to run out of breath as it’s more difficult to stay in tune, Autotune will not let that happen so I’m pretty convinced that no Antares Autotune was used at all. I told Mr Payne this and that given the poor quality of compressed audio on Youtube clips, I couldn’t hear any evidence of Melodyne either. I’ve investigated a bit now and find there have been some stories flying around the net that this performance has been tampered with, but how and who could tell, I don’t know. If it had, then it must have been Melodyne and whoever was doing the tampering didn’t do a good job because the tuning was all over the place!

Apparently Mike Stock was also asked by the Sunday Mirror at the same time as me to analyse the two videos too. I bought the Sunday Mirror and was sheepishly reading through it on my way to my gig at Carnival and didn’t spot any Susan Boyle Autotune scandals. I see now that THIS is Mr Payne’s Sunday story so Mike Stock must have came back with the same conclusion as me.

George pointed out, it’s tough that Antares are bragging about all the publicity and fuss this story is generating but the more sophisticated Melodyne can’t because it’s more difficult to spot so no one is talking about it so the general public have never heard of it!

He is looking for all genres as long as it’s master quality sounding. I think that’s why he wants to hear my students He is looking out for remixers too which is what I think a lot of you dance music producers might be more interested in. I will keep an eye out and give feedback where I can – I’m quite looking forward to it actually!

I’m taking a bit of a risk posting this on all of my social media because I know not all of you have done a course at Garnish School of Sound so PLEASE only send in mixed material you think would pass on a UK club dance floor or on the radio. Antony is looking for good production, If he doesn’t get much of it, he probably wont ask me again or even ask me to stop the forwarding. I’m afraid I don’t have time to listen to all of your masterpieces and only send the quality stuff on to Jess so please take this into consideration, because if you don’t, it could spoil it for others. Of course I do appreciate that one persons idea of master quality is not everyone else’s but Jess knows what to listen out for. This is really an experiment which I hope goes well and i’ll know quickly if it isn’t. I just wanted to offer this opportunity to all of my supporters.

Good luck and please let me know how you get on – I’m really looking forward to hearing the success stories!

Lesson one:

Warm up/Ice breaker – Introduction to myself, students introduce themselves and the music they have been working on. Introduction to the course and what we will be learning, why it will benefit them by learning it. Run through some ground rules. I wet the learners’ appetite by introducing and demonstrating oscillators, envelopes, filters, LFO, FX and modulation used in some famous records; what they are for and why we use them. We dissect a multi-track and analyse all the elements focusing on the synthesis and not so much the samples or audio. We look at the history of Sound Design and old analogue synthesizers. We cover the differences between analogue VCA’s and digital ones and zeros. I then tell the learners that they will be making their own sounds using the main elements and I will be assessing them at the end of the course.

Resources: Tutor workstation with Native Instruments’ Absynth 5 installed and internet connection, youtube, tutor chair, individual workstations with Native Instruments’ Absynth 5 installed for students, 8gb flash drive, 37”

Look out for Lesson two coming soon and see if you can spot any similarities to our Sound Design Course at Garnish School of Sound

I have a macbook pro plugged up to an apogee duet, pop shield or pop filter, some cables running from my dining room to my bedroom where I have made a DIY vocal booth out of my wardrobe and some dressing gowns.

You can see that  I have the mic pretty close to the clothes in the wardrobe to ensure as many as the sound waves from the voice are captured and absorbed before they get a chance to bounce back/reflect and end up back down the capsule of the mic again. The microphone’s polar pattern is set to cardioid so if anything did get a first reflection back out, the mic is optimised for one side. oooo, I love talking about microphones – I’ll try and do a whole post about them soon. I have two towel dressing gowns hanging up on each of the inside of the wardrobes. The idea is to create as much of a dead controllable environment as possible which then can be treated with exactly the amount and type of reverb you wish. There’s NOTHING worse than the sound of a vocal where someone’s just chucked a mic up in the middle of a room with stone walls – you get reflections bouncing all over the place. It’s a very thin horrible echoey sound which you can’t do anything about.

Pop shields are important and pretty cheap too – they capture the compressed air you give out when you make a ‘p’ or ‘b’ sound which ends up as really low frequency on your recording and can even cause digital glitching if it’s fierce enough. Once a hypnotist friend of mine popped over to record some vocals for an online hypnotising project she was involved with, I set the mic up as it but couldn’t find my pop shield, so I broke down a metal coat hanger, made it the shape of a pop shield (or pop filter) frame. The next thing was to find some tights to wrap around it, but I couldn’t find any of my girlfriend’s  so I dug a pair of her nickers out of the laundry basket! It did the trick with some gaffer tape and headphone wire.

Most people listen to music in their cars or on a cheap home stereo sometimes even in mono. If your mix doesn’t sound good on a pair of small speakers, there’s not much point. A pair of ridiculously expensive active monitors may sound amazing, but no one else has them, so your mix will be lost in translation. In an ideal world you would like a pair of studio monitor speakers which are easy on the ear and capture an element of the ‘biggies’ you’d fine in big commercial studios, so perhaps a ported design like the Genelec 1031‘s I use here and a sealed box type like Yamaha NS10′s for more of a ‘truer’ sound. Truer is all to do with their skewed frequency response, lack of low frequency resonances, low distortion and remarkably accurate transient response behaviour, all of which are qualities of infinite baffle designs using small, responsive drivers. Ported designs are popular in programming rooms and projects studios because you get more low frequency output which we all know and love – especially if we’re woking on dance records!

Genelec 8040a studio monitor speakers

If like me you don’t have space for two pairs of studio monitor speakers and like me given the choice of a ‘truer’ sealed box infinite baffle design or a more pleasing ported design, you’re going for the ported design you need to decide which ported studio monitor speakers you want. I’ve had my old Genelec 1031′s for donkeys years now and couldn’t recommend them enough! The new version of the old 10 series are the 80 series. I’ve heard that they aren’t as good as the older 10 series which personally makes me happy. If you have space, the 1032′s are a bigger and louder version of the 1031′s. In fact the whole Genelec 10 series always sounded the same right from the 1029′s right up to the 1032′s. Just the higher the number, the louder they got!

Focal SM-6. They do look nice don't they?!

I had a chat with Gav at Kazbar to get some info on popular choices these days and he recommended the Tannoy Reveal range starting at around £250 a pair if you’re on a budget which sounds really cheap to me, and Focal, a brand I hadn’t heard of before.

If you choose any of the common active brands on Gav’s or any good pro audio dealers website, I’m sure that you’ll get used to the curve, the room and as long as you check the mix in as many different environments as possible, I don’t see why you wouldn’t get the best results for your mixing ability.

I always recommend active speakers these days because the pain of even more studio cables, more hassle transporting, finding the right amp, messing about with crossovers if needed, and generally the greater margin for error is taken away by the guys in white coats at the testing centres of these popular brands. Let them do all the work so you can get on and enjoy mixing your record. Now there’s just the small matter of getting good at mixing!

Positioning:

I wouldn’t worry too much about exact angles when you decide where you are going to be sitting and where you are going to be placing your monitor speakers because you’re going to be moving around, which in itself is healthy for your mix because you’ll be getting a different perspective the more moving you do. For your main seating position, your head should be roughly one point of an equilateral triangle with each of the pair of your monitor speakers the other points of the triangle. So roughly an equal amount of distance between your head, each monitor speaker and distance between the speakers themselves.

Studio acoustic treatment:

As for studio acoustic treatment, and think next on the agenda is to write a whole piece on it, but very quickly, and you may need to do some Googling – you may want to start with some treatment behind your monitor speakers, consider a bass trap above your head and if you’re in a square room particularly, try some absorbing treatment to your left and right on the the wall.

We should be looking for a happy medium, neither too bright nor too much bass. If the aspirations we have for our work are that it should sound as good as it can on the widest range of systems out there; from top of the range hi-fi systems, portable mono radios to ipod players, then the perceived tonal balance of our monitors should be as close to the peoples average as possible. I encourage students to check their mixes in as many different environments as possible before putting their mix down; from studio monitors, built in computer speaker to simulate a poor quality mono radio (we use an Auratone speaker in professional studios for this), the car stereo (a favourite of mine), and even standing in a different room to hear only the reflections of your mix from a number of ‘natural’ diffusers and part absorbers which make up the hallway, curtains, plant in the corner and chest of draws under the stairs.

The most common nearfield monitoring systems found in professional studios are Yamaha NS10′s, usually used closed up and reasonably close to each other. The idea of having the same make of studio monitors in every studio you go to seems like a good one, you’d expect the sound to be the very similar from one studio to another, but because they’re passive (they need an external amp which can differ) the mix can sound completely different. On top this of course the differing sound of the rooms themselves. I personally wouldn’t fancy listening to NS10′s all day every day; high-mid frequencies feature prominently in their curve so they can be quite harsh on the ear, and there’s not much bottom end at all. I remember some engineers using them with a subwoofer, but not many. My NS10′s and amp are in my Dad’s garage – I just didn’t have the surface space for them in my programming suite right now but when I move, i’ll try and fit them in somewhere . The more ways I can check the mix as I go the better of course.

Left: Event Studio Precision 8. Right: Yamaha NS10m

This is the main reason why engineers like to use the same room for mixing time after time – they know the sound of the room, monitors and what’s powering the monitors, they are of course used to the console, outboard, assistants, staff, restaurant etc but in some cases they’re superstitious. Mark ‘Spike’ Stent was never comfortable venturing outside of the old Olympic Studio 3 after all the success he had in that mixing room. Once he outgrew the room, he had no choice but to move and he ended up buying the SSL G-series console he’d mixed so many hits on and plonking it in a bespoke control room he had built at Olympic just after my time there in the late 90′s. His near-fields of choice were the passive KRK 9000‘s. I wonder if they still are.

Then you have the main monitors or ‘biggies’ – some teachers and magazines say ‘far-fields’. One use for these monitors is when the A&R guy pops into the studio to tell us all that we need more midi or something (A&R people are much better these days, especially the ones who employ me now!). The biggies have plenty of bottom end, they are VERY flattering – you can fart down a mic and it’d sound amazing out of the biggies! The typical 90′s A&R guy will always leave the studio happy after hearing the a rough balance of the mix on the biggies before we’ve even turned on the (automation) computer. And of course after he’d played producer soloing the entire desk for no reason.

Genelec main monitors and some NS10's in Olympic Studio 1

But is this what we want all of the time when mixing a record? Of course not – we are not looking for the most pleasing experience for our ears, we want an accurate tool that will help us make the correct decisions, but at the same time not give us earache after an hour of monitoring. For this we want a pair of what I would call ‘alternative near-fields’. I say alternative nearfields because these monitors would not be the standard Yamaha NS10′s and be situated (usually) either side them. These are the monitors we should buy for our home studio set-up. So what are we looking for when we are choosing near-field monitors? And where do we put them?

To be continued…

The horn is a long sample that rises towards the end and pans slightly from right to left. It really gives the drop an uplifting feel by bringing out the major chord but you can’t really hear it unless you’re listening out for it.

Download the horn sample HERE

Audition or buy Albondigas HERE

Norman Jay MBE dropped in to grab his copy early. There may have been a football match on too that day but we won’t talk about that. Since then he’s played it at Glastonbury and reports are that it went down a storm. I still haven’t heard it on a big system and I can’t wait to hear it at Good Times at the Notting Hill Carnival. I’m going on the Sunday and we’re both DJing at the Good Times after party at the William IV if anyone else is about…

Anyone can build an Ensemble (synth, FX unit, sequencer etc) in Reaktor just like anyone can build an application for an iPhone. The difference is that Native Instruments don’t police or make money out of the distribution like Apple do for their apps. You can imagine there are a hell of a lot out there. I have uploaded all my synths beginning with the letter S for you to download. I can’t give you my whole library because it’s over 9 gb. I’m giving you a selection of synths because they’re probably more useful to you than sequencers or samplers and I picked the letter S randomly.

When I mention Reaktor, my students on the Logic course at Garnish School of Sound tend to glaze over before I’ve said anything more – they associate it with geeks who want to spend all of their life building synths. It is for geeks who like building synths (I don’t think many make records) but who is going to be playing with these lovely creations after they have been built? The answer is you and me. So in this video, I scratch the surface of Reaktor 5, talk through some of the bizarre terminology, show you how to navigate to your sounds and FX (ensembles) and how to flick through the presets (or snapshots in Reaktor land)

Once I settle on a bass, I show you how easy it is to assign controllers in Reaktor, I send the signal to an aux and pop in a reverb on the insert demonstrating reaktor as an FX unit too. I do dip my toe into the building blocks but just show you how to access them. In my Dance Music Sound Design course, we cover Reaktor in depth and even get synth building!

Watch the video HERE

Download over 100 Reaktor synths HERE

Watch the video HERE

My Logic 9 Music Production course starts this Saturday 1st May and there’s one space left to fill and all I want you to do is share my page with your friends of you’re a facebooker or follow me and RT my tweet if Twitter is your vibe. Facebookers send me a screenshot of your newsfeed to dave@garnishschoolofsound.com and I will reply with a link to all those lovely fat drum sounds. All the instructions are in my video with a blast of half of the samples for you to hear the phatness for yourself.

On a Mac, you take a screenshot by hitting ‘command, shift and 3′ a screenshot called ‘picture 1′ should then appear on your desktop.

Also, if you would like to link to Garnish School of Sound from your website/blog etc then send me a screenshot and I will be happy to reply with the html link and of course those lovely samples and the next kit if you ask!

Email your screenshot here: dave@garnishschoolofosund.com

Video to preview samples HERE

Download samples HERE

I have some amazing Kick, snare, hat and shaker I’m thinking about giving away too. I can’t say where I got them originally but I have ‘made them my own’ by processing them through Urei compression and Neve EQ. I’ll do a similar video when I have some time and will probably ask you to do me a little favor in return. Watch this space…

I hated the way Digidesign’s upgrade systems worked. I spent a fortune upgrading my Mix system to HD and it seemed only months later HD Accel came out. It’s part of the reason I sold my HD system when I did; I wasn’t about to fork out all that money AGAIN! Here is a recent letter they sent out to their customers telling them that they are building a website and dropping the Digidesign name if you’re interested. All those brand names were a bit confusing; Pro Tools made by Digidesign and Digidesign is owned by Avid. I don’t think many users even knew about Avid.

I do feel sorry for all those Logic users now lumbered with a HD rigs but soon will be unable to upgrade Logic. I don’t know why Apple are withdrawing support, I know that Avid and Apple have never been the best of friends but this really feels like kicking them when they are down. I wonder how much my Logic using pals will be able to get for their HD rigs now. I’ve been native for a few years now, I’m running 2 x 2.8 quad intel xeon, a load of ram and I can’t even get the beast to break into a sweat. I use an Apogee Ensemble interface now. I swapped my Rosetta 800 for the Ensemble because I wanted the lightpipe i/o when I ran Gigastudio. The stereo sp/diff i/o still comes in handy.

I can see the Mac Pro doesn’t break into a sweat because I use islayer’s iStat: http://www.islayer.com/ It’s a neat app which lets me know what’s going on in my mac; from the temperature of my processors and disk drives to how much processing power I am using and from which processors, handy when you want to see how your individual plugins use your processors. There’s even a handy ethernet bandwidth counter! All the stats appear at the top of the screen and look great; there are drop down menus of everything for more detailed statistics.

My advise to any Logic users with a Pro Tools rig is to come and do a Pro Tools courses with George or get those cards and interfaces on eBay NOW!

If you zip forward to 4 minutes and play from there, I touch on how I use loops and why I don’t use the loop tool and also on my preferred way of using the zoom tool these days. I’ve never seen anyone use loops and stop them with blank regions nor have I ever seen anyone set up the right mouse button to use as the zoom tool before either so it’s well worth watching, and I can’t see how anyone would go back after getting used to doing it my way. I really don’t know why anyone would use the loop tool and it’s starting to show that it’s not people who make music who beta-test Logic these days.

Watch the video HERE

Toby is THE Ableton man and although I have used Ableton to warp mark mutitrack drums in my time (and very nice it is too), I’ve not made any records using it alone. I have purchased a copy now with a view to rewire it into Logic and use it as a slave. Now it looks like Toby and I are going to be working together a lot, it makes sense to make a system which works for both of us. Next project is immensely exciting btw – same vibe, he’s played it to some labels before we even arranged it – I don’t even think Ableton Live was out of session mode! I previously dismissed Ableton as a bit of a toy, it didn’t sound great and was only good for warp marking drums and fiddling about with loops quickly. But seeing Toby Tobias on the mouse…. no, it’s great, version 8 sounds much better so now i’m going to include it here at Garnish School of Sound!

I’ve persuaded the Tobias to write up some courses with me and I’m aiming to have 6 workshops ready for mid July, and best of all, he has agreed to take at least the first set of workshops!! Amazing Ableton Live news from Garnish School of Sound!

I was always obsessed with my key commands in Logic, I used to swap key command ideas with my mates and I guess I ended up with a completely different set of key commands that the original Emagic ones. I actually learnt Logic in the early 90′s mainly by changing all the main key commands so they were the same as the old Cubase, which was sequencer of choice back in the day. Obviously when I move to another sequencer, none of the key commands are ‘right’ so I got round this by having my Logic preferences handy. Most recently by having a copy emailed to myself to my Hotmail account.

Last year when I started to teach, I found that my system of having my Logic preferences uploaded somewhere wasn’t convenient enough when I was having to constantly hop from one Logic workstation to another so I had to learn the standard ones all over again! Once exception though; I still HAVE to have my stop as ‘zero’ and play as ‘enter’ on the numeric keypad.

I only scratch the surface and I think I need to work on my presenting skills but I played it to a musician friend of mine who said he learnt loads about mixing vocals using audio compression – that’s the important thing I guess. I keep saying that there’s no time and don’t explain why. There was not enough time because youtube only let you upload a maximum of 10 minutes at a time and not because my dinner was on and I didn’t want to ruin it!

In the video I go through the various hardware emulations, talk about the threshold, ratio, attack and release parameters and the gain reduction meter of Logic Studio 9′s built in compressor. How I get my Lead Vocal to sit in the mix. When not to use a spectrum analyser and use your ears!

As I mentioned in the video, we spend 4 hours on audio compression in our mixing and mastering course now here at Garnish School of Sound so if you get the feeling I’m going too fast in the video, I probably am and now you know why!

Watch the video HERE

Just some more music theory rules. You will need to have some music theory knowledge or you could always book workshop 4 of my Logic 9 Music Production course. These notes are for recap purposes.

7 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED

9 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED and the 9th ADDED

11 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED, the 9th ADDED and the 11 ADDED

13 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED, the 9, 11 and 13 ADDED

Major 7 chords have the 7^th note in the scale ADDED

Major 9 chords have the 7^th note in the scale and 9^t note in the scale ^h ADDED

Major 11 chords have the 7^th, note in the scale 9^th note in the scale and 11^th note in the scale ADDED

Major 13 chords have the 7^th, note in the scale 9^th note in the scale,11^th, note in the scale and 13^th note in the scale ADDED

Suspended 2 = add the 2^nd note in the scale and suspend (lose) the 3^rd (mediant)

Suspended 4 = add the 4^th note in the scale and suspend (lose) the 3^rd (mediant)

Always count the root.

You can add notes to chords:

C add 11 you would add the 11^th NOTE only

C add 13 you would add the 13^th NOTE only.

Augmented is when you sharpen the 5^th (dominant)

Diminished is when you flatten the 3^rd (mediant) and the 5^th (dominant)

Root is always the tonic. If it’s the first note it is called the major root. We will mainly be working like this in this course. Don’t worry about “tonic”, “mediant” and “dominant” now. The chances are that you will never need to know and most hit song writers haven’t heard of them either! I just mentioned them in case some of you were interested and wanted to look them up one day.

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/piano/

A ‘+’ sign means sharpen and ‘-‘ means flatten the note.

Using the piano chord URL to see your major scales, work out the following chords:

Am, Gb7, E11, F sharp M-9, BbM9-5, CM maj7

To work out your major scales you can use the following rule starting on the root and working your way up in these steps:

Tone, Tone, Semitone, Tone, Tone, Tone, and semitone.

Now, work out the following chords WITHOUT using the piano chord URL.

Cm b9, Eb7, Fsharp M11, Db major7 add13, EbM7-13

Some of you may want to talk about voicing and inversions and we can later in the course. For now, here’s a brief summery below:

The terms “voicing” and “inversions” are often used interchangeably. However, the term inversions refers to the lowest note sounding in the chord (whether it’s the root or not). A chord with the root as the lowest note is said to be in root position; with the 3^rd as the lowest note it’s called first inversion; with the 5^th as the lowest note it’s called the second inversion; and with the 7^th as the lowest note it’s called the third inversion.

To play in a different key the easy way on the keyboard, you have a transpose button. So, to play your chord you’ve written in C and you want it to be played in D, you press your transpose button UP twice to go UP two semitones. To play your chord sequence you’ve written in C and you want it to be played in A flat, you press you transpose DOWN button four times so you go DOWN four semitones and so on.

Chords in  the key of:

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/chords/chordchart.htm

Relative minor is the minor chord which uses most of the same notes as the major scale. It has a lot in common with it’s relative. The same rule applies in reverse so C major is the relative major of the Am and Am is the relative minor of the C major. The reason it sounds ‘minor’ is because of the starting position (or root note) is different and is in a different place so in perspective it sounds ‘minor’

Look at the chords chorus of hotel California while I play it:

Chorus :

G                        D

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Em                   Bm7

Such a lovely place, such a lovely face

G                               D

Plenty of room at the Hotel California

Em                                      F#

Any time of year (any time of year) you can find it here

Listen to how the G and Em ‘relate’ to each other and the D and Bm7 ‘relate’ to each other too.

To work out a chord sequence by ear, I firstly figure out what the root note is for each chord and write it down. You can usually tell which note is the root note because the root note sounds the most like the whole chord! Then you have to figure out if it is a major or minor chord by listening and experimenting. Most of you should be able to do this with some practice and a bit of patience!

I looked on the internet for ages for good simple rules for chords, scales and extended chords but couldn’t find anything that I thought would be easy for the students to understand, so I wrote my own. These are recap notes written so students can refer to them after my lecture so you probably need to have some knowledge to begin with or you could always book workshop 4 of my Logic 9 Music Production course.

Working out basic chords quickly using semitones:

Major:             Root + 4 (3^rd) + 3 ( 5^th)

Minor:             Root + 3 (3^rd) + 4 (5^th)

Dim:                Root + 3 (3^rd) + 3 (5^th)

Augmented            Root + 4 (3^rd) + 4 (5^th)

To flatten a note you go down one semitone and to sharpen you go up a semitone.

Important:-

-                  Semitones are always the next key up or down on the keyboard; black notes AND white notes included. COUNT THEM ALL! We use semitones in the example above.

-                  Tones are two semitones (really?!) or two steps on the keys so a tone up from the note of C is D. A tone up from an E is an F sharp.

-                  When I say notes, I am referring to notes in a scale so you only count those. You will need to skip notes that are not in the scale. You will probably need to refer to a major scale chart or the first url in this work sheet to figure out which notes to count while working out more complex (extended) chords explained in the example below.

-                  Start off working out extended chords which are C. ie C11 or Cmaj7 etc.

A brief rule which you can use without the need for a chart is:

Root, +tone, +tone, +semitone, +tone, +tone, +tone (and +semitone to resolve back to the root up one octave)

For ‘Sound of Music’ fans, the notes should sound like:

Doh, ray, me, far, so, la, ti, doh!

Note that the “Doh” and the “doh” are the same note but one octave apart.

Okay, that’s enough of Music Theory for now. I will do extended chords next time…

The Chord Memorizer can be a useful music production music theory fix for DJ’s if you just want to quickly put some chords together which will have a good chance of going well with each other. I usually set it up so C plays chord one, D plays chord two, E plays chord three right up to B which will play chord seven. See this if you are unfamiliar with the chord number system. The Roman numerals are along the top.

In a nutshell, you can trigger all the chords in the key of C by using one finger on any white key on the keyboard from C to B which correspond to chord 1 (C) to Chord seven (B dim). All the chords in the same key have a great chance of sounding right with each other.

Chord Memorizer: Musical tips and tricks for DJs

So, first you crack open Chord Memorizer (windows – environment – click and ports – new – chord memorizer) Double click on it to bring up the double keyboard, Choose the note C on the upper keyboard. On the lower keyboard choose the triad of C major by selecting C, E and G like the pic on the left. Double click on the picture to make it bigger.

Next choose D on the upper keyboard and then select notes D, F and A. This will make a D minor triad. Next, choose E on the top and the notes E, G and B on the bottom, this makes an E minor triad. Notice that all the notes are white notes and equal distance in width apart. This applies right up to the B which will be a B dim so repeat until you get there. Now set the key limit on the left to the full range from C-2 to G8. This just tells the environment to use the entire keyboard.

Okay, now you can play all the chords in the key of C. If you up one in the transposition box (under the Key Limit), you’re now playing all the chords in the key of C sharp! If you go up ANOTHER 2 then you’re playing all the chords in the key of Eb. Eb is a hard key to play in – you’re a musical genius!

Here is a handy chart for commonly used chords in the relevant key. And here is a very useful tool you can use to see what notes go into chords and scales in all keys on the keyboard. I used both when I taught Song Writing and Music Theory.

Don’t forget to turn it off by bypassing it using a cable switcher when you have finished; you don’t want to be triggering a kick drum, open hat and snare when you’re trying to find a shaker in your drum kit! See here for more on that. Please don’t think now you know this trick, there’s no need to bother learning an instrument; Chord Memorizer is just a trick for people who quickly need to string a few chords together.

Before I get letters, I am aware that some Dj’s (like myself before I wound down) can play an instrument or two, but if I took a percentage of the DJ’s who have come to me for help, there’s no way we’d be reaching double figures. I would’ve thought we’d get similar stats for musicians who can DJ!

Many people are a bit scared of Logic’s environment and it even puts people off using Logic Pro as a DAW altogether. Logic Pro/Studio’s Environment is the foundation that Logic is built on. It’s been around since the birth of Logic in 1993 and remains pretty much the same to this day. Today we’re going to look at Logic Studio 9′s click and ports layer in the environment window which I think can be the most intimidating. Essentially it takes the midi notes you play on the keyboard and processes them using various objects depending on what you want to do. It does the same thing as the script editor in Native instruments’ Kontakt for all you Kontakt heads out there. Here is a pic of my click and ports page (click on it to make it bigger) It’s a bit more complicated than the Environment click and ports page out of the Logic Studio 9 box but still quite similar.

The strip on the far left is your controller keyboard. The pre process box tells you what you’re physically hitting on your keyboard. The post process box is a display of the notes after they have been processed. In this case, the keyboard is just a graphical display of the notes you’re playing on the keyboard but you can have it post processing or even have another post processing – you can set it up how you like. This is one of the reasons I encourage teaching on students’ personal workstations wherever possible on my music production courses

The Midi Click is your metronome so keep that lurking somewhere. The Octavizer just plays the octave up as well as the note you’re playing and comes set up in Logic Studio 9 (not Logic Pro 8) as standard. I deleted it because I know I’ll never use it nor is it interesting enough to include in any course. I have replaced it with the Delay line which is much more useful. The Chord Memorizer is used to trigger chords you set up to be triggered from one key on the keyboard. You can find and add objects by clicking the ‘new’ drop down menu.

You can access Logic’s environment from the ‘windows’ drop down or hit ‘Command 8′ Sometimes when you’re working on it, it slips behind your main window so I sometimes hit ‘alt’ then select it from the drop down and it becomes a floating window which won’t disappear. Try it.

You will see that they’re all cabled together. Nothing would work if there were no cables involved! All you do to cable things together is grap the ‘nipple’ usually to the right of the device, drag the cable to which ever device or object you choose. The key to my useful set up are the cable switchers, they are not the easiest to find so follow this path: new – fader – specials – cable switcher. I think you can guess the function of a cable switcher. To switch from one cable to the other, just click on the cable switcher itself. You will notice that I have a second cable switcher post the Chord Memorizer; one output feeds the sequencer directly and one makes a stop at the arpeggiator so all those lovely chords you are (not) playing get arpeggiated too. You’re a musical genius!

You can watch the video HERE

Apple haven’t exactly had a great record with mice. Remember that awful circular thing that came out with the first generation imacs? You never knew where you were about to track before you moved the mouse! Then the buttonless generation, buttonless because Steve Jobs doesn’t like the look of buttons! We coped at the time but now I can’t imagine life now without a right click!

Now we have the Magic Mouse. I had one popped into my Xmas stocking so I’ve had it a while now and between you and I, it was the toy I was most excited to get out and play with.

It doesn’t fill the hand like a Mighty Mouse; I know this is an issue for some but after a few hours, I got used to it. Tracking is supposed to be more accurate; it probably is but I never had a problem with the Mighty Mouse for tracking. Scrolling is much the same except you don’t have the much troubled physical ball anymore which can only be good. It’s nice the way you can pretty much scroll from anywhere in the top half of the area of the mouse as opposed to having to place your finger in exactly the same spot like before. Two finger swiping in Safari is great; no more tracking back up to that back button to view the main page after you read an article. Scrolling in Snow Leopard is joyful; I think they call it momentum. In a nutshell, the mouse knows how fast your finger moves and when you take it off, the page keeps scrolling and comes to a gradual stop depending on how fast your finger moved. SLICK! Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in Leopard unless I’ve missed something.

Just a quick note about MagicPrefs: it’s where you can set up all sorts of deeper functions for your Magic Mouse. For example, I set up two finger CLICK to get me straight to spaces, three finger TAP to expose all windows etc etc. Unfortunately when I’m zipping around my mac and my applications at the pace it do, I tend to put fingers on the mouse without noticing so I’m going into spaces, exposing desktop, viewing all app windows etc when I don’t want to and THAT is very annoying. Perhaps I could train myself to use the Magic Mouse more delicately. For now I have to turn all these funky functions off as it’s more important it works as a useful mouse than do tricks I can live without for now.

So the question is will the Magic Mouse make life easier for you in Logic Studio. And the answer is that it will do what the Mighty Mouse did and a load of extra funky stuff outside of Logic Studio but it should last a lot longer than 6 months!

Then in 2009 came Melodyne DNA (Direct Note Access). It promised what some called impossible: the selective manipulation of individual notes within a polyphonic audio file? I was certainly skeptical, but seeing a few videos on youtube last year blew me away so I couldn’t wait to crack it open myself.

When I did, I loaded in a stereo mix of All Saints’ ‘Never Ever’. The reason I chose this record is because I knew the arrangement inside out and wanted to compare the intro with just the vocal and piano, and the middle of the song when all the ‘bells and whistles’ are in. Although the mix feels full throughout, there’re not too many musical elements going on at any one time.

I found it easy to nip in and change the individual notes in the piano chords throughout the song. Impressively, change the pitch of all the instruments without effecting anything else playing at the same point. Even instruments which were relatively close to each other in pitch. Unfortunately, I struggled to ‘lift’ the lead vocal in any part of the song. Even the intro where it’s only the LV (lead vocal) and piano in the mix. The method here would obviously be deleting everything you see which isn’t the LV part. It just didn’t sound good enough. Not even with a bit of ‘splosh’ (reverb and delay)

Q: What use is this groundbreaking software to me? A: Unfortunately, I can’t think of any.

• The old Melodyne is fine for me to tune monophonic vocal tracks. (To be honest, I don’t know if DNA sounds any better using it monophonically)
• Acapella’s ‘lifted’ off of mixes are unusable.
• I don’t need to nick other people’s musical elements or chords in the form of MIDI *
• I will never spend money on session musicians or orchestras before knowing 100% how the chords and melody are going to go.

So, it is undoubtedly the most incredible software I’ve every come across and great fun to play with. But, I can’t for the life of me think where it would be useful to me!

*I did this with my Songwriting students: if you like a chord progression and would like to know what the chords are, you figure out the root note for each chord and write it down. You can easily do with my ear but it may take some longer than others to do. In a nutshell, the note that sounds most like the chord should be the root note. Now figure out if it’s major or minor by listening to it and experimenting; now (specially if it’s jazzy or bluesy) roughly figure out any extensions. Write all this down and play through again and again tweaking until it sounds good. I think you’ll find that (particularly if you’re playing a guitar and recorded instrument is keyboard based) you are already playing different inversions before you teak some more to make those chords ‘your own’.

Music Production Tips and Tricks.

People with home studios often do not realise just how important the acoustic environment is. We tend to get a lot more excited about spending a few hundred quid on a shiny new synth than home studio acoustically treating a rooms walls, ceilings and floors for standing waves. There is also the issue of aesthetics.

My lecture on acoustics can be six hours long and sometimes it can be difficult keeping some of the more musical and less scientific of students interested, specially when I start on standing waves. If we are in a room small enough (a control room or classroom and not lecture hall), a good way of vibing things up is to measure the distance between two parallel solid walls and try and generate a standing wave. You can determine what is the frequency of the standing wave for your room with this simple formula: V / 2d=f

• V = Velocity of sound (343m/sec)
• d = Room dimension in meters (length, width, or height)
• f = Frequency of the standing wave

Other standing waves occur at harmonics of the frequency that is 2, 3, and 4 times the fundamental but obviously, the higher the frequency, the less noticeable they become.

Why not try it yourself. Grab a tape measure and use the oscillator in your DAW. You need to have solid parallel walls in your space. Standing waves are the reason you never see parallel solid walls in a professionally treated recording studio control room.

Neil Johnston from Focusrite showed me the KRK ERGO. Wow, what a little box this is (if it does what they say it does of course). KRK make fantastic nearfield monitors and I would say are a company to be trusted. The first time I listened to a pair of KRK monitors was when I was assisting Mark ‘Spike’ Stent mixing Madonna at Olympic. The article the link goes to was written a few years after. Seems ancient now when he talks about Zip and Jaz drives! He had a pair of KRK 9000′s which sounded fabulous. Back then pretty much all monitors were passive and so were the 9000′s. It seemed crazy to me but a lot of freelance mixers karted around their monitors of choice from one studio to the next but just used whatever amp that was in the studio. Active monitors solved that one.

I’ve always had a problem with bass in my studio. I am lucky to have very high ceilings but unfortunately I think most of my bass gets lost up there in the chandelier. I do get a bit of bottom end but much further back from my seated position in front of the monitors. I have treated my room behind my monitors and I have some bookshelves at the back with act as nice diffusers for the mid frequencies. I could’ve of course have lost the chandelier and replaced it with a huge bass trap but I don’t think my girlfriend at the time would have been feelin’ that! And quite frankly, I like my chandelier, my high ceilings and the position of the studio so I make do for now by sticking my head in certain spots just before any waves get diffused by my bookshelves to check the bottom end. Also, I check in the car which is only on the driveway. It’s inconvenient, but I know the curves so well now in the space, I can make it work.

So maybe the KRK ERGO will be a much more convenient solution for me. It works like those Bose hifi systems by chucking out a load of test tones (all frequencies at the same time interestingly), monitoring them with a microphone and feeding back the data to the software (Mac AND PC btw). The box will then tweak your curve and theoretically, you will get a much ‘truer’ curve where you position the microphone. Gav said he would be able to get one for me to try. I will get back to you with my thoughts i’m sure.

If it is as good as they say, they will sell bucket loads. Given Bose have been doing something similar for the consumer market for years, I wonder why no one thought of doing this ages ago especially now with so many more records being made in home studios. I also wonder if the technology is any better than Bose’s or if there’s any patent. If no, I reckon KRK won’t be the only people making these boxes in 2010. I wonder if it can do anything about standing waves. I didn’t think at the time to ask Neil. Oh, that thought is what got me on standing waves here in the first place!

I do cover standing waves in my acoustics lectures at music production schools, colleges and universities and also in my music production courses in London.

It was a great course to teach but tricky in that they all didn’t want to learn all of the course. For example, most DJs wanted to learn about chord progressions and basic music theory for their productions, but were not interested in lyrics or any of the basic song writing production tips. Some of the out and out songwriters would’ve been happy to talk about lyrics for 12 weeks! I balanced it by splitting the group up and did as much one to one tuition as I could. I have broken up my own Song Writing and Music Composition Music Production Course into two shorter courses so no-one will feel like they are wasting time and money learning things which they feel is irrelevant to them.

Being a guitarist and not a keyboard player works out rather well, I am able to demonstrate the pros and cons playing in different keys with both instruments. With a guitar, it’s all about the shapes, and the same shapes up and down the fret board is the same song in a different key. With a keyboard, it’s all laid out in front of you from the left to the right. When I first took on a Songwriting and Music Composition course I was mildly concerned that piano not being my first instrument may be a hinderance, but in fact, it’s benefit!

Automap is very useful; if you have a Novation Remote or Remote SL, the software assigns all the parameters of the plugins to the midi controllers of the Novation Remote or Novation Remote SL so you don’t have to figure out or assign a midi controller for the filter cut off or what ever parameter of your plugin. The Automap software is programmed so it knows which parameter is on what midi controller and displays it on the display making things much easier. Newly supported software plugins include exs24, es1, es2, Sculpture, es m, evb3, evd6, efm1, es e, es p, evoc 20 ps, evp88, Ultrabeat and even the test oscillator!

I personally have a Remote 25 SL, and it is available to use and I can demonstrate Novations Automapping software in my Logic Pro Courses and Music production courses.

I was very impressed by the way you now warp mark the audio transients as opposed to the grid now in Ableton Live 8. Also seeing it work with the Novation lauchpad was awesome. You can buy the Novation lauchpad for £150 and get a cut down version of Ableton thrown in. I will definitely be purchasing and call it a little Xmas present to myself!

I was thinking of rewiring it and using Logic as the master (because Logic will only be the master) doing all the clever audio stuff in Ableton then running it in the background or perhaps print it in Logic when I’m happy. I have an 8 core 2.8 mac pro so I shouldn’t think I’ll have too much trouble with grunt running both DAWs running. I also found out that you can use Live 8 as a master OR slave which would be handy if you wanted to run it as a master and use Reason 5 as a slave. The guy was saying that there is a track limitation in the cut down version and it doesn’t come with all the FX and synths the full version does. That suits me because I can’t see myself using it as my main DAW, and if one day I decided to switch from Logic (yeah right!), I can upgrade it. I’m working with a DJ pal called Toby Tobias and we’re working some some disco house productions. Latest one has just been signed to Flashback. He’s and Ableton Live head and after working with me, he is now learning Logic! I’m not sure if I’m blowing Logic’s trumpet here or mine. Maybe a bit of both but my statement is true! I was thinking of getting the Novation lauchpad because off the back of these productions, I am getting more DJing work again and I’d love to try that system out live. So I guess MY conclusion of Ableton Live 8 is that it’s very creative in session mode, very fast to manipulate audio and get things done quickly but still, a bit of a toy and will no way replace Logic Studio 9. Also, I’m still not convinced the sound is up to scratch. What the hell, toys are fun right? And with Logic Studio 9 still being the meat and potatoes of my system, I get the best of both worlds! I did ask him if I could run Logic Studio 9, Ableton Live 8 AND Reason 5 together but he didn’t know. May download the demo of Live and see. There are some nifty things I like in Reason 5 and it’d be interesting to see.

Last week I went to Putney to see a chap who is fairly new to music production. He needed someone to go to him and set his workstation up, as he had just bought a system but didn’t know how to put it together. Of course it would have been boring for him to come to me for a crash course only to get home and not be able to practice what he had learnt! There’s always a music production tutor floating around in the area so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like some one-2-one help.

It was a bit of a shame because he had bought a load of stuff from a branch of a large chain of pro audio suppliers. I would have advised him to buy different equipment and certainly not from this chain. I didn’t rub it in though as I didn’t want to upset him, and what he had was workable, but he could have bought better stuff for his money. I’ve been using Gavin at Kazbar for more years now than I care to remember. I’ll give you an idea of how long. People were not really using email much back then and I was working at Universal publishing as their engineer before they signed me. Universal needed their studio kitted out, well, I insisted they needed a lot more gear than they had at the time! I sent one of these instant email thingys round to around a dozen companies and Gav was one of the only people who came back to me on email! Since then, I have used him and his excellent tech support. You can call him and he knows what he is talking about and doesn’t favor any companies or products because he has a warehouse full of something he needs to get shot of. Another thing is that he’s his own boss and the only sales person so you know that a year down the line, you email or call the same person, you get the same person.

You can get him on gavin@kazbarsystemsinc.com and here’s his webiste.

Enough of my Gav ad; I will let him know he owes me a beer!

Right, I’m off. My boiler has broken down and my fingers are getting a bit nippy and I need to put them in to some gloves. This blogging for Music Production Courses lark is alright isn’t it?

This is what we can look at:-

-Basic Synthesis (ES1, ES2, Juno 106, Korg Monopoly) Sound Design, creating your own unique sound.

-Apple Loops.

-Logic Instrument plug ins

-Programming Beats

-Logic Basics in music produciton

-Reverbs, delays and Dynamics (gates, compression, side chaining, side chain compression)
-Chords and keys the easy way. Melody and lyrics

-Advanced Logic and other plugins

-EXS 24 Sampling, Chopping up loops, hiding your sampled loops, filtering

-Sound Engineering, Recording, Outboard and microphones.

-Mixing

-Arranging

Lots of music production tips and tricks – Beginner to Advanced

Update:

I now have joined forces with SSR. Please see the SSR London site for more information on music production courses, audio courses, sound engineering degrees and electronic music production courses.