Well, my boot drive just died, so I can’t make any music this weekend. But I can post another blog about past productions đ
The goal was simple: Create groovy, buzzy, driving and hot tune that could hit festivals. No elaborate arrangements or sound design extravaganza – jut distort everything until it burns. I intentionally picked simple synths, Sylenth1 and Vacuum Pro, to make simple and oldschool yet effective sounds.
I never played any instrument for real. Recently decided to change that and ordered brand new MPD218 from AKAI, simple but high quality drum controller.
MPD218 is one of cheaper controllers on the market, but does the job. Pads are sturdy and large, very convenient. It also comes with two percussion plugins – one of them is conventional percussion kit, the other is called Cinematic Percussion – which is particularly interesting for me. Includes great cinematic and world/tribal samples and instrument kits which sound just right for my purposes. There are also, however, some kits with no apparent purpose. Other sets flange and phase, which suggests they include duplicated samples. Instrument kits are also not ordered in any pattern, both kicks and toms are scattered all around pad. I will need to sort them out on my own, anyway.
The unfortunate suprise was that plugins are protected with iLok, which I didn’t realize even though I check stuff 10 times before I buy it. Took me some days to get support from AKAI. Now it’s all working, though it’s the first time I couldn’t use a product I purchased straight away. This whole iLok thing is absurd, avoid it as much as you can.
Now it’s the time to actually learn how to operate this device in a proper way. So there is Melodics app, which is basically Guitar Hero version for drum pads. There is limited free version, which was well enough for starters. Quickly I realized I never played any instrument just because my timing is abysmal – but after just an hour I made progress from “totally hopeless” to “very beginner”. There is a number of lessons available in free version and just after few days I feel more convenient with drum pads and playing in tempo in general.
Melodics is based on subscription model. I even wanted to buy it for a month, but my card was denied – probably because their bank is based in New Zealand or something. They’d better introduce promised PayPal option before someone cracks this app.
Seriously, software companies make it difficult for client to buy a product or even use the product already purchased. On the other hand, all the products mentioned above were not available just few years ago, so making music is easier than ever. Learn, profit.
I made two tiny plugins in the meantime and want to share them with everybody.
Comb Filter
Among hundreds of effect racks, mastering suites and filter banks sometimes it’s hard to find exactly what you are looking for. That thing was comb filter, as simple as possible. What it does is to filter out even or odd harmonics and boost the others – perfect for shaping the noise of percussion, in particular.
Take a look at frequency response from Wikipedia:
Alpha on the graph is represented by “Mix” knob, while “2pi” is your frequency.
Comb filters are also elements of phasers and flangers, so you may want to use them that way.
Features
Volume Halver
Plugin designed to reduce track volume before mastering without loss of precision.
Halving the volume may sound like trivial operation, but there’s more in it. If you try to lower the volume directly from your DAW, multiplying by real number may result in rounding error. Volume halver fixes that, as it multiplies the signal exactly by half, so no rounding is present. This way the only precision you may ever loose is the least sgnificant bit – but that’s inherent disadvantage of any computer system and not the tools you use.
It doesn’t even have GUI – just drop one on two on your track before mastering, so it does not clip.
DJ Warmonger blog 