I had the good fortune of sitting down with Dave for a few hours last night and having him show me some great production hints. I didn't want to lose that info, so I've decided to capture it here. I'll also try to throw other music related stuff in here -- tracks I'm buying, gigs I'm getting (or not getting), and mixes etc.
Dave uses Fruity Loops primarily, though he has some experience with Abelton Live. He switched from hardware directly to FL over 10 years ago. Here are a few of the basics that we went over:
- Use of battery: Battery is a powerful sampler, and the respective version 1,2, and 3 have different features and uses. We installed battery 2 and got to work. One of the first things you have to do is enable the envelope on samples, or else you'll have samples playing over and over again. You can hit the panic button (a red !) if your samples are playing out of control; this kills all of the sound. Once you've enabled the envelope you can play with the regular parameters (attack, sustain, release, etc) on each sample in the bank. We brought a long sample (15 seconds, 4 bars) into the sampler. First we adjusted the tempo (or tune in battery) to match the sample with the track (used the metronome). Then we wrote a simple pattern in the piano roll that had the sample triggering on both the downbeat (first 8th note) and one that triggered on a 16th note. The reason for this is that we want to hear how the samples sound on both the 8th notes and 16th notes; we don't want to generate a whole bunch of samples that only sound good on the expected 8th notes. We started playing the sounds and then started looking for little subsets of the sample that sound good (using the envelope). When we found something, we would copy and paste it to another pad, and then keep looking. In this way we quickly generated a dozen small samples from the larger sample.
- Battery continued: Next, we added a simple filter to the samples. We then added an LFO to the filter cut-off. Initially it sounded weird because the LFO was ossiclating to a frequency that was not a multiple of our tempo. So, we enabled 'sync' on the LFO, which synchronizes the LFO with the tempo. Then we enabled 'trigger', which re-starts the LFO along when the sample hits (I believe .. need to check on this). Sounded great!
- Peak controller: Next, we looked at something called a peak controller. What we did was route the kick drum and snare into the peak controller. Then we set the trigger on the filter in battery to be triggered by the peak controller. Now, when the peak controller hits a certain threshold it triggers the filter on the samples, which is an interesting effect. Dave also connected the peak controller to the volume of the sample on the mixing board, which basically made the volume of the samples come up with the amplitude of the kick+snare, and then drop back down when the amplitude dissapears. He described it as a way to tighten up the layering of sounds; if you have too many elements layered on top of each other try tieing them together with a peak controller to make it really tight. You wouldn't really use a peak controller & an LFO together BTW.
- Shuffle/Swing: Okay, this is a bit of a tricky one. So swing basically means taking certain notes and having them trigger a little late. The degree of lateness corresponds to the degree of swing. Note that Abelton has global swing where as FL does not, which is one of the downsides of Abelton in Dave's eyes. He mentioned that they often use the same swing in their track, which is to take every 16th note and give it a slight nudge. Gives things more of a human feel.
- Improving basslines: We went into Abelton to look at the track that I've been working on. One of the issues is that there a note in the bassline that is louder and has a higher frequency, which makes it really stand out. I tried re-arranging the bassline to remove that note but it just sounds better with th note. What we did was add an EQ to that line, create a big gain with a really tight Q on the filter, and then slowly go through the frequency range of the bassline until we found the high-frequency note that I was talking about (it was super loud at that point b/c of the Q & gain, we do this to help find it), and then eq'd it down slightly with the filter. Then we were able to bring the level of the entire bassline up. This is a good technique for reducing the impact of one note or several notes without removing them all together.
- Improving keys: The biggest suggestion Dave had with the keys was to actually add some random shuffle to them, leaving the 8th notes in-tact but changing up other keys. This reduces the montony of the patterns. Other suggestions to make the keys more rich were adding compression (to stabilize the amplitude of the keys) and adding a chorus.
Phew, I think that covers it for now. I'll add some more comments if anything comes to me.
