Mitch

making the jump

STEP1 for 10% between now and the 26th. If you make a purchase, you get a code emailed to you for a bigger discount after then

sounds about right side note, why would this be released as "Pioneer" though? I'm assuming the sale hasn't completely been finalised but i would've thought this would've been marketed under the new company or something Think they would still be keeping the pioneer name with the acquisition

I'm not running X yet, but if you didn't know any of these yet, some of this applies to users of Logic 9 too. The Piano Roll is used to graphically edit and display any recorded MIDI you’ve played into Logic, or it can be used to step-enter notes directly. You can also edit the controller data you play like pitch bend and modulation here. In this article I’ll show 5 Piano Roll tips to make working with your MIDI recordings easier. Tip 1 - Make All Notes the Same Length Click a MIDI region in one of your songs and press the P button on the Mac’s keyboard. This opens the Piano Roll window. When playing bass lines, programming drums, or recording chords and melodies you’ll often want all the notes to be the same length to achieve a tighter feel. Select the notes you’ll be processing by either selecting them with the mouse, or press Command-A to select all. First, click the end of a region to adjust its length. Then hold Option-Shift while you’re adjusting. All selected note ends will snap to the current grid setting. Tip 2 - Make All Velocities the Same Now while you’re at it, you might also want all MIDI velocities to be the same. More often than not, velocity—how hard you played the keys—is assigned to an instrument/drum’s volume, so adjusting this will level out the sound’s overall volume. This can be great for stabilizing a kick or a MIDI recorded piano/keys part. Again, select the notes to be leveled first, press the Option key, then drag the velocity slider up and down. Tip 3 - Quantize Notes to Fit Your Song’s Key and Scale Although I prefer using Region Parameters (at the top of the Inspector), you can easily quantize notes and even “quantize” to a musical key and scale here. Yes! You can bang out random notes on your keys and they’ll still fit your song perfectly! From the Piano Roll’s inspector, you can select the root key and pick from a nice list of scales. Tip 4 - Moving Notes Around With Key Commands Whether you play the keys or step-enter every note, being able to easily move a single note left or right—without accidentally adjusting its start and end points—is very useful… also, moving notes up and down to change their pitches. Select a single note in a MIDI region and while first holding Option, use the Up and Down arrow keys. This moves notes up and down the vertical piano on the left. Now what about left and right? That would be great if it would jump to the grid. Right-click or Control-click on a single note and from the “Set Nudge Value To” menu that appears, select “Division.” Now while holding Option you can use the Left and Right arrows to move a note/notes by a snapped division step. Tip 5 - Edit Pitch Bend and Mod Wheel Data The wheels on your keyboard controller are great for bending and adding life to your sounds. When you record from these, you can easily edit this data. Click the icon to the right of the local view menu. The MIDI Draw area will appear below the Piano Roll. From the “Controller” drop-down menu in the inspector, select either Pitch Bend or Modulation. You can easily edit this data when it appears. Clicking on any Node/Point will allow you to adjust it. From the Piano Roll’s Snap Menu, select “Snap Automation” and the data will now snap to the grid/division setting. You can also switch to the Pencil tool and draw data freehand! Source: askaudiomag.com

Welcome Not a wedding/mobile dj myself,, but I know some of the better ones can charge 700-1k for a night (including travel, ~6hrs DJ time, setup & pack up). From my experience, there is a lack of good mobile/wedding DJs out here, so you could definitely get a side business going. Also, there is a couple of others from Newcastle on here, I'm sure they can give some more insight into that area (I'm from Victoria). Hope this helps.

I'd personally pay extra and get a UV cannon as it will look 100x more pro

Will check out

I've used the JBL eons before, and they'd be fine for what you do. I don't rate the behringer PAs much from what i've personally heard.

Ryan Keeling discovers how a sequencer and a saloon in the California desert both played a part in the duo's new album. James Ford and Jas Shaw "don't understand why people would want to knock out the same old shit all the time." As a result, each album they've recorded as Simian Mobile Disco has been different. They've made pop, electro house and techno, and worked with a variety of vocalists—Jamie Lidell, Beth Ditto and Gruff Rhys among them. Delicacies, their series of dance floor 12-inches, has recently featured collaborations with Bicep, Cosmin TRG and Roman Flügel, projects that casually came about to find out how the combination would sound. Ford and Shaw's inquisitive streak is reflected in the studio. Every available space in their cave-like spot in East London is occupied by blinking racks of hardware. They like turning stuff on and seeing what happens, but are equally excited by running stripped-back setups, and thriving on limitation. The only rule, really, is to try new things. But even by Ford and Shaw's standards, the idea behind their new record is ambitious. Whorl, their fourth studio album, will "blur the boundaries between studio composition and live performance." Last month they played at a saloon in the Californian desert using a skeletal setup that included two modular synths, two Sequentix Cirklon sequencers and a mixing desk. A recording of the performance will form the basis of their album. It was the first time they'd played without a computer. When I met with Ford and Shaw in the days leading up to the show, they were deep in rehearsals and planning. There was still some uncertainty about their setup, but I think they were secretly happy about this. Perhaps we could start with you outlining the premise of the new album. Jas: So in between all of the other albums that we've done, we've always gone back to doing 12-inches, with the Delicacies series stuff. And this time it's been much more collaborative, so we have called in other producers. And I think we were both kind of eager to do something not 12-ish, if that makes any sense. And the album is also something that fell back from our live show, which we've been progressively pulling all of the crutches out of. Increasingly we were making it on the fly just to keep it fun, to keep it so it didn't feel like a "space bar show." We've managed to get the drums so that they're all completely programmed live. We watched a quite a few shows, and the ones that we liked best were just a couple of machines. And when you look back to how music was made up until probably the mid-'90s, that's sort of how it was. It was like: drum machine, delay pedal, couple of synths, mixer. Bish, bash, bosh. We don't need a laptop. The laptop has actually become not very helpful. So we were like, "Alright, get rid of the laptop." What will replace it? We looked at MPCs. We looked at all of the other options. I considered building a [sequentix] P3. The sequencers that we've got are effectively the step up from the P3. And just like, when we looked into what Cirklon could do, it was everything that we knew, really. To sort of drive back to your question, to a large extent the nature of the music was very much defined by the rig. Which I know is kind of perverse on one level. But on the other level we've always found that with collaborations, for example, that defines the nature of the record. We get that person in there and even if they don't do that much, for some reasons it comes out with a bit of a—it smells of them, you know? Effectively we kind of functionally made the setup so that there was less duplication. The setup, in order to be mobile, needs to be smallish, and each function or unit in the modular world is pretty big, certainly compared to the laptop world. You know if you want a bass thing it takes up this much space. The first probably two or three weeks was just popping modulars in and out, fixing stuff. James: Well, we were still doing that last week as well. Like, "Oh, maybe this could be better." Jas: It's been a kind of productivity vs. collaboration. Have you been guilty of overcomplicating your live setups in the past? James: I don't know. Jas: Oh really? It couldn't be more complicated than this setup. If anything, we've much more overcomplicated it. James: I think we're quite good at keeping a handle on technology versus productivity, because that's a real wormhole you can fall down, especially with modular gear. You know, when you start, the gear takes more precedence than the actual music, and that's a disastrous situation. We're very aware of that and are constantly trying to make sure that the melodic content, and the content of the music, is taking precedent over whether the modulars are the right way around or in the right configuration. In terms of the live performance aspect of the album, how did that conversation start, and why did you end up thinking it was the right idea for this project? Jas: I suppose it links back to a lot of the records that we were enjoying, that obviously were done in that way. To not just go into the studio and start Pro Tools and to just vomit a lot of ideas down and spend months editing them. Just kind of spend some time in a rehearsal room and get these ideas and hone them. And then the next time, if it works in a rehearsal room, generally speaking it works so much easier—and then just press record, you know. Also I think we were just really excited about recording in a different way. I guess it feeds on from the live record we did, which was live versions of stuff we'd already done. Having everything going at the same time and being able to manipulate it is very, very different to recording the things in one by one and fastidiously doing each one. James: I think as well it was just an exciting prospect for us, and that is justification enough in itself. The idea of getting rid of the computer and doing something that was kind of live and a bit more loose was just an exciting idea that's made us create this little bunch of music we just created. Is there a significance behind the location of the show? James: It's just that I've been there before and really liked it. An opportunity of a gig presented itself out there, and then it just seemed like the two things really fitted together, and it seemed like a good idea to make the live show and the studio version of ourselves meet directly in the middle. Meet for a showdown. Pistols at dawn. How have you been preparing for the show? What have the weeks leading up to it been like? James: Actually, this last week has been a little bit more fraught than we thought, because we kind of made some really good progress at the beginning, once we'd built the system. We felt the music came together pretty easily. But then, actually retracing our steps and playing it again, obviously with the modular thing we've got a lot of oscillators cross-modulating, and we actually found a little bug with the sequencer that meant that things weren't coming back exactly. It was really hard to get back to certain points. So when we were rehearsing the set all the way through, we got to a certain point and it was just like, "Oh my god, we're nowhere near where we needed to be." So were you setting yourselves milestones? James: Yeah, and definitely within the show there are things that are now like flags in the ground that definitely are gonna happen. It's how we thread our way between point A and point B that changes. But it's like, we need to get to these certain points. Otherwise we couldn't get away with it being an amorphous, freestyle jazz thing, you know? But then when you're trying to get from point A to point B, and point B is totally nebulous and amorphous, and it doesn't come back like you expected it to, it's pretty scary. And we tracked it down to an actual bug in the software in the sequencer, which we've got the guy to fix, and so it was actually like, proper—we started freaking out a little bit. Were there particular features of the sequencer that drew you to it? Jas: Basically we needed just a step sequencer that can save patterns. It doesn't do any sampling. It's difficult to tell exactly, but rhythmically it feels really tight. Like really spot on. And everything just sits together nicely. James: I think as well, just looking into it is a bit like a 909 or something like that. It is quite intuitive once you get used to it, and so it is very playable for things like structures, like dropping things in and out or looping sections and things like that. It's just kind of instant. So it's almost like you've got a physical connection to the structure of the sound, if that makes sense. As opposed to like on a computer, it always feels like you're one step removed from that. Do you think that using a hardware sequencer gives quite a different end product? James: Yeah, I think part of the reason that we chose to do this whole project was that it was a closed system. It's a limiting factor, so the bass sounds and the lead sounds are only ever going to be made by particular elements in the system we created. And the same with the sequencer: you can only do certain things with it, it's not like it does everything. We've run into a few brick walls where it's like, "I cannot do this thing I want to do." But then that in itself is a good thing because it means that you find a creative way to step around that particular problem. More often than not you find a different, better thing. And that self-imposed limitation thing is something we always try to do with other people when we're producing their records, and so this was a way of us doing it to ourselves. The modular systems that you're using are the same that you've always used? James: Just as, like, an amalgamation of the modular system we've toured for years, with some new modules configured in a different way. My system is much newer. There was one module that only arrived last week, that was kind of the cornerstone that I was waiting for. A lot of them are very, very new. That whole world of Eurorack is kind of exploding. Loads of people are just making very new, sort of esoteric designs. There is one particular module actually called Braids that we just started using, and another one called Yarns by this thing called Mutable Instruments. They've been really, really useful. We've been using them a lot. But yeah, one particular one, the Yarns, I only got last week. Does your use of modular synthesis have roots in a particular ideal or line of thinking? Jas: I suppose one thing that we've always been really interested in is the electronic pioneers—Joe Meek, Delia Derbyshire and a lot of that kind of early, early stuff, where they didn't really have any other option. It was a decision to make modular stuff. But that's something nice, that stuff makes you approach music in a slightly different way. If you take a Minimoog, which is a great synth, but it's definitely like a keyboard, so you approach it like a keyboard. Whereas if you take a pile of oscillators and some modulators and stuff, you're not going to play like on a Minimoog. It just isn't going to work that way, and I think that's something we've always been interested in. Is there a feeling of individuality fuelling it a little bit? James: Yeah, that is the idea. I remember being a teenager and making a pedal board and swapping effects pedals around. And you know if you put the distortion after the reverb or before the reverb it makes a big difference to the way the two things interact. And that idea is the heart of much of the stuff, really. It's the fact that you can take elements that are in most of the synthesisers, but they're kind of discrete units, so you can swap them around and play with the way they interact with each other. That opens a whole world of possibilities and that idea is exciting to us. You talked about the wormhole effect that is inherent in this stuff. Do you feel as though you've become more disciplined down the years? Is this something you have to learn as a modular synthesis enthusiast? Jas: Yeah, I mean if you go on modular synth websites—which I'm not saying that we do—it's fucking rubbish. They're all just making the same pointless cross-modulation bits—so boring, just the most boring thing in the world. James: You could say that about any forum, though. Jas: Yeah, that's true. I think particularly people are like, "Oh, I made this amazing noise." And you listen to it and it's like, "Uh, I don't care about that." I think that's the thing, that the default setting for a modular synth is to make weird, wiggly cross modulating noise. And that is as interesting a point to start from as, for example, a piano, which makes very well tempered interesting noise. But you really have to do something with that modular noise. It can't just be that. Having two people there is so good, because at some point one of us just says, "You're boring." James: You're boring me. Was there a particular vibe or sound you were aiming for with the album? James: I think we knew that we didn't want to make a straight-up clubby record, because we've been doing this Delicacies thing where we've been aiming at just making club tunes that we would wanna play, which has kind of been a motivation for quite a while. But for this album, we definitely had in mind I suppose the obvious kind of krautrock, sort of Cluster and those kind of influences; Tangerine Dream and the kind of more proggy—a lot of the early electronic stuff that Jas has just talked about. Kind of Raymond Scott and those kind of things. And also in a modern way, I absolutely love that James Holden record from last year, and the Luke Abbott stuff. Have you traditionally had a fairly fluid relationship between your live shows and the studio? Jas: We started out just doing remixes and it was purely a studio thing, and then it gathered some momentum, and we were like, "Maybe we should do a live show?" Probably someone else said to us we should probably do a live show, and so we kind of begrudgingly put a live show together, and then we actually found we really enjoyed it. It gave a different aspect to it that we hadn't had before. I think gradually, as time has gone on, the live show has fed more and more into the way we actually made the music, to the point where on the last record [unpatterns], it was very much recorded as live performances, even if it's just one thing at a time. We record the bassline as a take and then edit that down, and the chord thing as a take and edit that down. That's always been the way we've done it, but then I think this is the final step in that chain. It's like The Fly—we've finally become the fly. With the collaboration series, I was interested to know why you reached out to the guys that you did? James: I think a lot of it was just chance meetings with people. You know, we'd be playing a gig with them. You end up going out for dinner or getting drunk with someone and then it's just like, "Wouldn't it be fun to mess around in the studio? Why don't we do that?" It wasn't very considered. It was more just kind of what happened. We've got links with Bicep, and met Cosmin and Roman out and about, and it just all seemed to work out really well. They all ended up just coming around to our studio and messing around, and it was really easy and fun. It’s something that we hope to do more often in the future. When you get someone in the studio for the first time, what does that first conversation sound like? How do you define roles, so to speak? Jas: You know what? In theory you have that conversation, and a lot of bands are like, "Maybe we should have something ready just in case." You know, something to work on. But 90%, in fact, not even 90%: 100% of the time the people have just turned up and been like, "Let's just try something. Let's just plug some boxes in and see what happens”—which is actually how we always work. I don't think we're unusual in the electronic world in just going in, plugging things in and then seeing what you've got and modifying it. I think that thing of having an overview of exactly what it's going to be before you've started is a bit of a myth. Or at least it is for us. I think that you have a bit of an idea of the kind of thing you want to do, but it generally appears as you do it. It's the process itself that sort of yields the decisions that you make, and it kind of crystallizes in front of you. It's not like you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and go, "I'm going to do a track like that!" Your style from record to record seems remarkably different. Why is this the case, do you think? Jas: To a certain extent I think it's integral to all music. I think it's particularly integral to electronic music to always be hungry for change, to always be looking for something else. When DJs are looking for records, you're not looking for that record that you already have. You're looking for: "What the fuck is this?" And similarly, it's integral to modular synth things. You plug all the cables in and what you really want to happen is like, "Jesus, what is that?" And I think that with every record we're just very conscious that we want to explore something else. Obviously over the years I've learned that it pisses people off, and it's a bad thing to do, but I can't really understand why people would want to knock out the same old shit all the time. Has this been reflected in the setups that you've used on the albums as well? Does this change in line with the sound? James: I think so. I think this setup is indicative of how it's always been. It's like, if we've got this bunch of stuff together what could we make? It's that excitement of what's going to happen. We don't know. It might good. Even if it can lead you down some odd paths. I think if you were happy with the thing that you did last you'd never make music ever again. You've got to be like, "I can do something better than that." Are you presently doing much stuff with bands and other projects? James: Yeah, on-going production with other things. Quite a lot of pop writing and producing for other people. Recently I did Arctic Monkey's most recent record and the Haim record. A few things like that. There is lots of other things on the go, but until it comes out you never know what's going to happen. Is your headspace quite different on those sorts of projects? James: Totally different. But that's what is good about it. Again, what we were saying about defining a system—that's kind a producer's job with other people as well. Defining the boundaries of what is allowed on this particular record. Is it fuzzy guitar sounds? Is it roomy drums? Is it really stripped down? Defining that system is production, in a way. Have you thought much about why it does work between you guys? James: I think we are both fairly mellow. It's not like—I don't think it's one of us who wears the trousers if that's what you're getting at. You said that. James: I think the fact that we're still making music together after this amount of time means that we just enjoy making music together. Having been in lots of situations with other people making music, it makes you appreciate that we've got a pretty good working relationship in that way. Jas: The point of it was just: "I've just heard this new record. Are you into it? Yeah, I'm into that. I've got that synth. Should we muck about on it?" James: There is no better feeling than being excited, and to go in and do something. That initial buzz of the work, or when an idea starts to crystallize, is the point of it all. That's the most exciting bit for me, personally, rather than playing out in front of people, going to places, things like that. Whatever it is. That bit where something happens and you're like, "It could be this and this and this." That excitement is the whole point of doing it, and I'm pretty sure me and Jas will still be doing that when nobody gives a fuck. Simian Mobile Disco play this year's Movement festival in Detroit, which runs May 23rd through May 26th.

Looks like a nice, portable interface for when on the go. Thoughts? Suggested Selling Price: $399 Expected month of arrival: November This extremely compact, bus-powered USB D/A converter plays both PCM audio and ultra-high-resolution DSD audio, providing extremely high-quality sound for on-the-go music production, live performance, and listening enjoyment. With up to four channels of low-latency output, the Mobile UA can accommodate multiple listeners or independent click tracks and cue monitoring. World’s smallest USB audio interface that supports both ASIO and DSD High-quality audio playback from Roland’s newly-developed S1LKi audio engine Native playback of 2.8 MHz DSD audio Ultra-compact four-channel audio output High-powered 158 MW + 158 MW (at 40 ohm load) headphone amp Supports ASIO and Core Audio; designed for low-latency operation S1LKi DSP Audio Engine Supports Both DSD and Standard PCM Playback The Mobile UA supports native playback of DSD audio sampled at 2.8 MHz, and our proprietary S1LKi audio engine also reproduces traditional 44.1 kHz and other PCM audio with extreme precision. By using the same type of 1-bit D/A converter used in DSD, the resulting conversion produces ultra-smooth, unclouded sound when compared to existing D/A conversion. *5.6 MHz DSD audio is down-sampled internally and played back as 2.8 MHz DSD audio. Four Outputs and Ultra-Compact Design for Mobile Production and Live Performance Ultra-compact and bus powered, the Mobile UA features quality stereo mini-jacks on both the left and right sides. Two people can monitor audio at the same time, or a single musician can use one side for the main output and the other for cue monitoring or a click track. Low-latency ASIO and Core Audio performance provides compatibility with a wide range of professional applications. *When a jack on one side is configured as an Aux output, any volume adjustments you make on the unit will not be reflected on this jack. High-Performance Headphone Monitoring in Loud Environments Featuring two channels of 158 MW output at 40 ohms, the Mobile UA’s high-level headphone out supports monitoring situations where isolation from ambient sounds, nearby performers, and crowd noise is essential. Low Latency for Music Creation and Sound Editing The Mobile UA inherits Roland’s acclaimed VS Streaming technology for low latency and stable operation, and USB audio streaming and DSP are processed on a single custom chip. This provides mobile music creators pro-level performance for playing virtual instruments and editing tracks in DAW software. What is DSD? DSD, or Direct Stream Digital, is a technology for digitizing audio using much higher frequencies than the typical PCM format. Each sample is recorded as a single bit at a sampling rate of 2.8 MHz, which is 64 times that of audio CDs (44.1 kHz). DSD formats that use 5.6 MHz, or 128 times that of CDs, are also widely used. Because DSD is capable of recording at higher levels of precision than audio CDs, it is primarily used for recording and music distribution.

Live!

I've used wharfedales in the past, not sure what model they were (2x15" tops, 2x18" subs passive) I'm assuming the Titans are acceptable quality wise. As far as sizing goes, really depends on how big the venue is etc. 2 15" actives should be enough for most gigs for a few hundred people. Plus weddings you don't need it so loud that everyone goes deaf. Hope this helps

Welcome

I'm live now radio

https://soundcloud.com/decay-records/microsociety-alex-arnoutbroadanse-remix

https://soundcloud.com/enterofficial/richie-hawtin-vs-luciano-enterweek-3-main-space-ibiza-july-17th-2014 Just a casual 5 hour Hawtin set

https://soundcloud.com/groove-magazin/david-k-groove-mix

Don't forget us m8

Also if someone has an alternate program for Windows that can do similar stuff just as quick (preferably free), link it here for everyone

There is no use going up from mp3 to wav.. The only time I have done that is when I've got a 320 mp3 sample and wanted to load it into Maschine, as it only accepts wav. Or sometimes I'll convert stuff to aiff before i drag it into logic. It just takes more hdd space but doesn't improve the quality. This is just something I use a fair bit importing from Cd, as well as converting to 128 for uploading stuff to ADJF Radio / online elsewhere etc.

I've been running this setup for a little while now, and thought i'd share with you as it's a good time saver Much quicker than audacity etc: Download and install XLD for Mac - http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23430/ ... ss-decoder 1 - Open it up. You won't get any UI at first, but don't be alarmed! There is a set of menus at the top of the screen. 2 - Open the preferences & customise to your liking 3 - Go to the profile menu -> save current settings as. Name it something that reflects the settings you just setup 4 - rinse and repeat for each set of preferences you'd use regularly Now, to convert files all you need to do is select the profile and drag the file(s) you wish to convert onto the dock icon, and they will convert and output as per your preferences profile. You can also import from cd via the file menu. Here is an example of how mine is setup: Finder folders Profiles in XLD I've found this to be stacks quicker than audacity, because you already have your settings setup, and you can do batch processing. Post below if it helped / if you need help getting it going

heya