Sound Design Tech
Subaqueous Live Performance

Coming from making an album and in studio work to a live set brings a hole other world of changes and things to think about. It can be daunting after spending so much time in creating a track to then put it into a live set.  This tutorial is going to take you through my own process and show a simple and streamlined way of doing it. These Techniques will lead to a great live performance that keeps a good amount of quality from the final bounce down.

Bounce Down the Track

The first thing to do is go to your abelton project with the song you are getting ready for a live set. It is a lot easier for work flow in mastering and composing as well as for this step to keep your tracks organized. By grouping your tracks into groups you can easily bounce them down as well as during the mastering process you can have all your bass in one group and eq it and so on.

Here is an example of a track I have grouped togeather:

Usually I go with these groups:

  • Ambient
  • Melody 1
  • Melody 2
  • Accent Rhythms
  • Drums
  • Kick
  • Bass
  • Bass2

As you can see in the example I don't use all of these categories, and I fit the sounds into the groups that I feel fit best.

After getting them in groups is the fun and time consuming part of bouncing it all down. What I do is solo each group and bounce it down. So I would take "ambient" and solo it. Then Export Audio and save this track as "trackname_Ambient" And would continue this for all of them. Make sure you make the analysis file as well to make it easy to drop in a session.


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Creating a Instrument Pack in Ableton

Creating your own instrument pack is a really fun and important part of electronic music production. There are an unimaginable world of sounds out there, but creating your own unique sound is very important to be known for your "sound". Killowatts and Vibesquad have a unique and unmistakable sound that helps them be known as musicians. This technique will also save you a lot of time in your actual song production. 

For the example of this tutorial I will be going over how I put together my (aq) Rhodes Pack from a recording I did of an Original Rhodes MKii at London Bridge Studios in Seattle with the help of CJ Stone and Brian Baron.

So to start I dragged in an instrument rack. Then when you view the "chain" you can see only one. I dragged in 5 instances of Drum Rack.

Before this I took the recording of my Rhodes and sliced it up into samples. Such as "c2" D2" and up the scale. Then I just dragged and dropped those samples into a different Simpler instance for each note of the drum racks. Now since I have 5 different mics I have those different channels with each sample from each mic. SO when I hit c2 I get all 5 of those playing.

You can then add effects and fine tune it by midi mapping controls. I took the chain volume and mapped it to the macros for the instrument pack so I can dial in the volume or sound I want.

That is pretty much it. Very simple but now I have my own Rhodes sound that I recorded myself.

You can download the (aq) Rhodes Pack at my store to get an idea of what I did, and also have a rad new instrument.

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