To bring his solo productions to the stage, Nicolas Jaar expanded his sound to include a live band. Playing Ableton Live with his band, Nicolas leads a set full of improvisation and creative transitions. Ableton caught up with Nicolas and his band at Sonar 2011 for an incredible performance.
Soon Koma Elektronik will release some cool new video’s about their new effect pedals starring Dutch artist Marlon Penn. This clip is one take of the filmshootings from the beginning of this month. No editing, no color correction, just the raw footage and camera sound of Marlon playing around with the KOMA Elektronik BD101. It’s a Analog Gate/Delay with a lot of possibilities, here with just a guitar and an amp.
What can the Keith McMillen Instruments SoftStep do with Ableton Live? Performance, production, stage, studio, SoftStep from Keith McMillen Instruments does it all. This video showcases some of what SoftStep can do when controlling music software such as Ableton Live. Featured are various control setups for performance and studio situations. SoftStep is the worlds first first Multi-Touch, pressure, and motion sensitive foot controller.
The Pulveriser plugin is one of the three new effect devices within Reason 6, next to the Alligator en the Echo. In this micro tutorial Propellerhead take a look at the Pulveriser. Pulveriser is a sound demolition unit capable of destroying your signal but before you turn those knobs up to eleven, I wanted to show you that Pulveriser also excels at being an audio sweetener. In today’s world of pristine digital recording, meticulously sampled instruments, and quantized MIDI it’s sometimes necessary to add a little color and grit to your otherwise perfect material.
The ‘Rome Calling’ pro-audio seminar in early June was a great success! The Eternal City created a perfect frame for the event, and the keynote speakers willingly shared all of their expertise on recording, mixing, mastering and broadcasting with the participants.
Beatport is one of the major download websites for EDM (Electronic Dance Music). For years and years the website has been operated on the Flash platform. Several months ago they developed a ‘next version’ website running HTML-5. After a beta test period Beatport is now celebrating the formal launch of their newly re-engineered site. More than 20 percent of the Beatport customers were a part of the beta testing and feedback process.
The Octatrack DPS-1 is an 8 track dynamic performance sampler. The Octatrack is ideal for radical audio processing and performance oriented sampling. Every track features real-time pitch scaling & time stretch and the next generation Elektron step sequencer has been designed with maximum usability and efficiency in mind.
The video below is from Madeon, a 17 year old DJ/producer from France. He uses the Novation controller to make a live mash-up with numerous tracks (check out this Youtube description for the complete tracklist). The Launchpad is purpose built for triggering and manipulating clips in Live, it also offers a totally new way of controlling Ableton Live’s mixer. Launchpad’s buttons can be used to sketch out beats with drum racks, and they can be assigned to other functions in Live using Ableton’s ‘Learn’ mode.
The DDJ-S1 offers familiarity, innovation and pure controllerism to maximize performance with Serato ITCH software (which is included). The perfect home or mobile DJ set-up, the DDJ-S1 features balanced XLR input/output for connection direct to professional PA equipment, and a microphone talk-over feature to make MC’ing a breeze. Add to this the simple Plug and Play connection, amazing software features and superior hardware control, and the Pioneer DDJ-S1 is a major force to be reckoned with.
Singer/Songwriter Olivia Broadfield composes and records all her music from the confines of her home studio. At its heart is the Focusrite Saffire PRO 24. Olivia speaks to FocusriteTV about why she loves it so much.
This video is an artist testimonial by Rob Fabrie aka Waxweazle, aka Headbanger. Rob is since the late 80s and early 90’s a producer of electronic music in mainly the ‘harder’ genres like hardstyle and hardcore, but has ventured in other genres like trance and clubmusic as well. He talks about the use of various Rob Papen plugins and let’s us see how he utilizes Robs plugins in a ‘haunting‘ hardcore track.
Steinberg recently unveiled HALion 4, the latest and most powerful incarnation of the industry-acclaimed VST sampler. With a cornucopia of innovations and improvements, including a state-of-the-art sample engine, a complete synth section and inspiring tools and effects, HALion 4 is set to be the new global standard for professional sound design.
Stretta: “Yesterday I planned to see if I could get plane -p into shape for release, but I had an idea for a tuner adapted to the monome using the analyzer~ external. Semitones are displayed on the grid, and you can shift the window side to side to display a different range of notes. The arc is displaying a strobe tuner simulation. I’m not sure how useful it is a a tuner in practice, but I’m still glad I did it.”
Does the world really need another drum synth? If we’re talking about Rob Papen’s Punch, then the answer is YES. Check out this video to see how to divide up your drum parts in Punch and process each individually. Top-drawer stuff.
Novation spent a day with Heidelberg based DJ, composer, mix-mastering-engineer and producer ‘LOPAZZ‘ as he showed us how he has integrated Novation’s Twitch in to his live setup.