Viraj's Weblog

Here is a great tutorial on using formant filters in Ableton. These are used to create human voice-like sounds. In general, Tom Cosm has some great teaching videos on Ableton.

I have a lot of songs sitting around as works in progress. It's really hard to go from playing around on the guitar to a full song with all the right sounds. This new song started with some experimental sounds and a very simple bass line. I was trying to get a tight kick and bass sound but things were just not sounding right. Then I woke up this morning thinking, "wait a second, my attack setting on the kick drum compressor is way too high!" Yes, it's sad, but these are the things I lose sleep over. Ableton has a great multi-band compressor that lets you compress different bands like high and low. I also realized that it's useful to have a compressor on the master track too. When you look at the waveform for an unmastered song, there are lots of peaks that come due to sounds falling on top of each other or they are simply in the frequency that you can't hear. Tacking on a limiter to the master track smoothes these peaks out and you are able to increase the overall volume a bit. I still take the approach of trying to get my song at -6db. Then to reduce the variation more I'll tack on a limiter on the master. Poor man's mastering.

Anyhow, this song uses an awesome plugin called Amplitube which has some hard guitar effects. The only problem with this plugin is it eats up CPU. Ableton's "freeze track" feature helps a lot here (essentially resampling the track into an audio file instead of running through the plugin live). About 3:30 into the song I accidentally cut and pasted the tracks shifted down (so the effects were all going to the wrong tracks they were supposed to). But this sounded so good that I kept it and was inspired to double the tempo at the last minute. I give you: Time Crimes. Not the movie, but that's great too.

Here is a really good Frontline on the cheap airline industry.

Here is a new song. I played around with some Ableton distortion effects on this one (notice the static drum track). The song changes quite a bit, probably because I spent weeks on it. Still it's pretty cool.