Blog #5: Room Treatment
It’s another musician-centric technical post! If you’re more the listening type, check out my new single with Jurrane, Tayrona, due out in a couple of weeks on Discover Records.
Moving on…
For anyone with a music studio, moving locations (be it house or office space) can be extremely stressful. I keep my studio at home where I can get at it whenever the mood strikes me, and our last house move left me with a room that I simply couldn’t work in. The bass, mids and highs rang around the room, and werelumpy and uneven, despite the fact that I had 4 large custom made bass traps. Clearly something needed to be done.
Along with lots of forum-trawling and generally swotting up, I got in contact with the incredible helpful Ethan from RealTraps. His products were being regularly recommended in Sound on Sound magazine at the time, and he was a regular forum contributor on the subject. He had a lot of useful advice, and I ended up buying four of his standard MiniTraps as part of my re-organisation, along with having some stuff custom made – more on that in a moment. I will link copiously to the RealTraps website in this post, as it has a lot of really useful, detailed information – starting with this useful article on acoustics basics.
The process of getting a studio started seems to break down into two stages, Positioning and Treatment. The first is free, so let’s start there.
Positioning
An ideal studio listening position - from RealTraps.com
Aim for:
- Speakers firing down the room lengthways, and positioned the same distance from the side walls as each other
- The listening position (where your head is) approximately 38% of the length of the room from the wall behind the speakers (the back wall)
- Speakers and listener forming an equilateral triangle
- Speakers pointing at the back of your head (so you’re slightly forward of the geometric sweet spot)
- Seat and speakers height set so that your eyes are at tweeter level
You will probably find this means some compromises. The speakers will end up closer together than looks natural if the room is small; in that case the distance between you and the back wall might not be big enough for the speakers to get wide apart and still maintain an equilateral triangle. So be it – still aim for an equilateral triangle!
Treatment
The next bit is where to put broadband absorbers, a.k.a “bass traps”. There are a bunch of commercial designs. Realtraps make one but if you’re handy with materials you can make them yourself for a fraction of this price using just timber, cloth and rockwool.
Try, in order:
- Side walls, covering the area where if you held a shaving mirror, you would be able to see both speakers from the listening position
- If it’s a small room, the back wall, directly behind your head
- The ceiling above your head covering the area where if you held a shaving mirror, you would be able to see both speakers from the listening position
- The floor/side wall/back wall corners
- The ceiling/side wall/back wall corners
- The rear corners
- The back wall in a large room
- The centre of the back wall at the corner of the back wall and the ceiling
Try and cover 1, 2 if appropriate, 3 and preferably 4 as soon as possible, then build up the rest! Note that the corners will have by far the biggest effect on the bass levelling, but you have to have your reflection points on the side and ceilings covered otherwise your mid and highs will be ruined – and that is even worse.
What About Eggboxes?
A lot of people seem to swear by covering walls in foam panels, but I’ve never found the need. Broadband absorbers have very good mid/high absorption characteristics, so when appropriately placed, do an amazing job of deadening the sound. As for the rest of the walls, it actually makes sense to have them acting reflectively, because it gives you a subconscious impression of “liveliness”. You don’t end up mixing all your music to sound good in a completely dead room.
Some useful links:
- Acoustic basics
- How to set up a room
- Check out how to create a reflection-free zone
- Placing Realtraps (applies just as much to any broadband absorber)
- Another guide to making and placing broadband absorbers. He doesn’t cover the RFZ (reflection free zone) stuff that I’ve covered here.
Blog #4: Ableton Live Tricks – Real Time Rendering
I realise that this is going to be of no interest to 99% of you, but is more for the benefit of future Googlers who are lucky enough to own Access Virus TI synths and use Ableton Live.
I love both, but one thing has been driving me nuts for ages, and everyone had told me it couldn’t be fixed.
One of the seemingly most commonly requested features amongst Virus TI users who also use Ableton Live (including me) is real-time rendering. Because the Virus can’t render its parts offline, it is necessary to render sets in real time, but Live seemingly provides no options do do this.
Users resort to all sorts of annoying workarounds to this problem (myself included, until I worked this out), such as bouncing the Virus parts down to separate audio tracks, then doing an offline render, or setting up a resampling record track and bouncing the entire arrangement, then fishing around in the project folder for the file, which they would then need to reload in a new set and dither down to 16 bit separately.
However, it is possible to trick Live into rendering your set offline, by making it think that there are real external synths involved in the set.
To do this:
- Create a new empty MIDI track
- Add an External Instrument device
- Route the MIDI to a real hardware MIDI out that isn’t in use (there’s usually one around somewhere!). In the screenshot I have routed it to the spare output on my FW 1814 soundcard.
- Route the Audio back from a real hardware audio input (can be in use for something else – it really doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a real input, not rewire or a multi-timbral plug in). In the example I have routed it back from inputs 7/8.
- Turn the gain on the external instrument down to -Inf so the low-level interference from your sound card doesn’t affect the output.
Now when you render, Live will detect the presence of a “hardware” device and assume it has to render in real time, meaning that all your Virus parts will also be rendered in realtime.
Joy.
Blog #3: Loudness
The following is a repost of my comment on the Anjunabeats forum at http://www.anjunabeats.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=31854&st=0.
The discussion was started by Above & Beyond Tony making a plea to the trance community to stop sending in tracks which had been mastered so hard that they competed with re-compressed radio mixes. As usual, any mention of mastering and compression sent everyone off into a solid rant. It occurred to me at the time that people get too hung up on compression, limiting and saturation, and that there are a number of other issues at stake.
Here are my thoughts on the matter:
I think people get too hung up on loudness as being a direct consequence of RMS power, when in fact the ear is a lot more complex than that.
It used to be that tracks were mastered to sound good on big fat club soundsystems, end of story. It made obvious sense: over time, mastering engineers (who were absolutely required, since someone had to cut the vinyl) learned what frequencies had to thunder, which ones had to punch, which ones the hi-hats had to really shred and which ones no bugger is going to hear anyway, because it’s pumping out of 3-inch hi-end drivers. And which ones, not to fine a point on it, were going to be completely destroyed by a cutting process which drove the cutting head so hard that it was constantly distorted (this, by the way, is that lovely warm vinyl sound that people talk about).
Here’s the rub: if you’re mastering for a track to sound good loud, you don’t want to much in the high frequencies. High frequencies hurt; the ear is far more sensitive to them than any other range. So you make sure they are in short bursts, not sustained assaults. The ear is good at taking these in its stride (short cracks of high frequencies are common in nature, so we’ve evolved to deal with them. White noise most certainly isn’t).
The really loud sounding tracks, I tend to find, are tracks that over-represent the high frequencies, thus pushing your ear that much harder in its most sensitive areas. The thing is, when your track is played really loud, you really don’t need to over-represent high-frequencies. Your ears will do that for you by distorting to buggery anything that they hear.
I present for the defence: Agnelli & Nelson – Embrace. One of my favourite old tunes. Listen to thad pad lead that kicks in around the peak of the track, and you’ll notice it’s mostly midrange, with just a bit of high. Play that tune at 140dB on a wall of Turbosound tooth-rattlers, and suddenly it sounds like you’ve been hit by a tsunami. Listen to it on a home stereo and it just doesn’t. Unless you happen to have a Function 1 widowmaker in your front room, terrorising the cat. And if you do, can I come around?
Trance has increasingly become a style of music which is heard on headphones and home stereos far more than it is heard in clubs, and the discerning buyer has started to demand that they have their ears battered by a wall of trance energy that sounds like what they expect when they are in a club. DJs want to buy the tunes that sound huge when they are buying stuff from Beatport on a pair of iPhone earbuds. The end result? In order to get your tunes sold, you need to target that requirement.
Which brings us back round to the classic loudness wars catch-22 situation. Who’s going to be the one that starts producing tracks that sound quieter, knowing that it’ll mean their remix will be the one in the pack that no-one notices?
DJs look at the peak meters on their DJM-800 and go “they’re the same volume”, because they’re peaking at 0dB. Very few actually now A/B the two tracks on the cue, use their ears instead and realise that one has been clipped to buggery and the other one has nice flowing dynamics, or one needs the hi-end turned down. Which producer will take the plunge and wave the flag for dynamics, by releasing a track that sends the crowd to the bar because it sounds 6dB quieter than the previous track?
And who’s going to spend £hundreds to get their track mastered by an old-school pro engineer, get it sounding awesome loud, but get it ignored by buyers because it sounds soft and lacking in definition compared to modern stuff?
I’ve focused on high frequencies as an example, but there are other factors too. For example: stereo spread is used heavily in radio mixes and on tracks to make them sound big, but this has the opposite effect when played loud. Or good, grunty sub-bass is removed, taking away the chunky rumble and replacing it with frequencies that can punch harder on a 3-inch home speaker. I could go on.
My personal view is that we should return to the fine days of a proper club mix and non-club mix, where the two are pretty similar except that the club mix is more focused into the middle of the stereo field, avoids super-high (10khz+) frequencies, softens the highs and is mastered for punch, not sustained energy.
Blog #2: Whatever happened to good filler?
There has been a change in the way I feel that dance music is DJed in the last 10 years. Particularly trance, but while researching this article, I also spoke to a breakbeat DJ who felt the same way about his genre. The problem can really be summed up as: it feels like hardly anyone writes good filler anymore.
Strained metaphor
By “filler” I mean:
- The kinds of tunes that don’t get massive reactions from the crowd, because they’re not meant to. They often don’t get asked about; they will often pass peoples’ conscious minds completely; they are the stabilisations in energy, the moments when a crowd can get it’s breath back, the opportunities to groove away and have happy exchanges with all the cool people around you and think “man, I’m having such a good night”. And yes, maybe for attention to wander a bit, for the toilet to be visited, the drink to be replenished. Such things are necessary, despite our fragile DJ egos thinking that our mad spinning skills should compel people to inflate their bladders until they can be kicked like a car tyre.
- Or even more difficult to get right - they might be the kinds of lynchpin tracks that take a set from one place to another. Tracks that might start with a drop in energy and slowly, imperceptibly build, layering up percussion and simple melodic parts. I’m talking about tracks that can shift a set from one style to another smoothly, or shift a set up a gear without taking centre-stage. These tracks for me have always been the DJ tools of trade, the absolutely essential but unheralded swiss-army knives required for crafting a memorable set.
- Another kind of filler might be the kind of track that slowly tightens the grip on the dancefloor – a DJ can watch it happen. They’re really getting into it, and it didn’t take a string of peak-time bangers to do it. The room subtly fills, the dancing gets more insistent. The odd “whoop” can be heard. Nobody’s rushing up and asking what the tune is – they’re too busy dancing and laughing and smiling at each other.
A really good piece of filler for the situation might keep the crowd simmering, but not boiling. It should keep people interested, even captivated, but not enslaved. The whole point is that when the next big tune comes on, it is when the DJ decides it is the right time to grab the entire crowd by it’s balls and say “have this”. The explosion in energy at moments like this is what people will remember at the end of the night. The entire crowd move as one and that sense of partying together really takes hold.
YES! This stuff gets me going! For me, the best fun in DJing and working a crowd is not about arriving with a walletful of thumping anthems and just letting them have it – it’s about that feeling of taking a crowd on a journey. And I don’t feel like the music scene is providing those sorts of tunes in the abundance that it used to.
The problem is: somewhere along the line “filler” became a dirty word. Another way of calling a track an “also-ran”; a footnote. If it’s not a big tune, it’s not a tune at all, or worse, in my book: if it’s not a big tune, it would be a “better” tune if it were bigger. How did we get to this stage? If a DJ plays non-stop big tunes for 2 hours, he desensitises the crowd, and the big tracks stop getting the big reactions. We all know this. DJs need filler to make sets work.
Filler, for me, does not mean a crap tune! A crap tune is a crap tune, plain and simple. A good bit of filler is just a different kind of tune.
Here are some awesome past tunes from my library that I’ve used for this sort of thing. Track them down, and love them as much as I do!:
- Paul Van Dyk – Forbidden Fruit
- Illuminatus – Hope (Salt Tank Remix)
- Empirical Labs – Turtle Beach (Outback Remix)
- Ambassador – The Fade (Fade Remix)
- Odessi – Moments of Space
- Son Kite – On Air (Lemon 8 Remix)
- Bissen – Night Terror (Terror Mix)
- Max Graham – Airtight
- Digital Nature – Oasis (John Askew Mix)
- Jochen Miller – Chromatic (Miller Dub)
- John O’Callaghan pres. Mannix – Acid Rain
- Foreplay – Supposed I’m Leading
- Dan Stone – Made In Bahrain (Orkan Remix)
- Mesh – Trancefixion
- Onova – Platitude (Sebastian Brandt Remix)
“Hang on, there”, you say. “There are plenty of trance DJs out there playing sets with clear rises and falls in energy. Not everyone is trying to beat the crowd to death with massive tunes”.
I agree, there are. DJs are a creative bunch. I like to think I’m doing the same thing too. This isn’t an exercise in writing excuses, I’ve already done that. If I felt like I couldn’t play a decent set anymore, I would have quit by now. I think, by and large, we do a good job. However, I know a couple of excellent carpenters, and I know that if I gave them a small coping saw, two used rawlplugs, a piece of chewing gum, a copy of a Davina McCall exercise DVD and half a cucumber, they would be able to fashion me a set of shelves and fix my roof. If you’re good at your job, you can make a square peg fix a round hole. A good workman blames his tools, leave no cliché unturned etc etc.
What I meant (before I disappeared up my own proverb) is that the trance DJ community has found ways of working around the absence of custom-written filler by appropriating different kinds of music and using them as filler. To return to my slightly rambling analogy one more time, we have just sharpened the cucumber and got on with it.
The two standout mechanisms that seem to be used are:
- Alternating trance and tech-trance (2 on, 2 off and variations on a theme)
- Playing prog (progressive trance, a slower, groovier, often melodic but definitely not anthemic form of trance) at the same speed as the trance.
I’ll start with the latter, because it’s just reminded me of something. Progressive Trance. I almost think the change in meaning in this term has become a perfect example of the point I’m trying to make. It used to be, that for me as a trance DJ, progressive trance was the go-to style to find great filler. These tracks were very much “proper” trance; the energy was all there; these were tracks meant to be danced to. They sounded like trance. They were just not all written to be the biggest tunes in a DJ’s set. Progressive trance was music that was designed to take a dancefloor on a progressive journey.
Progressive trance now (or just “progressive” to use its sanitised form) has metamorphosed into what to me sounds like much more of a distinct genre in itself. It’s slower, it’s often got more than one eye on listeners rather than dancers (unsurprising given the numbers of listeners that internet radio stations now have compared to the numbers in clubs) and at the moment, leans heavily on electro and minimal tech influences for its basses and grooves. I love loads of this stuff, but for me it misses the mark when sandwiched between two big trance tunes. It works well on its own, or paired with tracks with a similar energy, or as a buildup to trance, but when played in between trance tunes, the energy usually seems to be in such a different space that it doesn’t often fulfil my criteria for being good filler. It’s simply great music of a different genre.
Interestingly, I worked out a while back where loads of excellent progressive trance producers must have gone around 2002. Psy-trance. There is the most unbelievable wealth of fantastic progressive psytrance out there, it blows my mind. There is only one downside; as a whole, progressive psytrance is, again, just a little too low-energy these days to mix well with trance. There are excellent exceptions, but they’re nowhere near as numerous as I’d like.
Tech, I feel, suffers less from this dichotomy of energy. For many high-energy DJs, it’s like manna from heaven; hi-octane tunes that the crowds love, that’s great fun to DJ, has credibility, mixes reasonably well with trance and can be used to break up the big trance peaks. Yes, to all points. There’s only one problem: these are all still big tunes! I would quite happily peak with tech-trance! The pattern seems to be: play constant big tunes, but alternate the style of the big tunes.
To be honest, this works well. In fact, I think it’s probably the best way to play at 2am-6am. Non-stop floor fillers but without a tired dancefloor. Exactly what any dancefloor would ask of the headline DJ.
But it’s not what I’m talking about. As I’ve strived to make clear, I still think DJs are doing a good job; I just feel like there’s a kind of set which you don’t hear so often anymore, and I’d like to hear it again.
So what happened?
I think it all boils down to the following factors:
- Commercial pressure
- Web forums and internet radio
- The digital format
- A change in the makeup of clubland
Commercial pressure: less tunes are sold than ever before. Dance music has passed its heyday (at least in the UK), and digital downloads are claiming a chunk of the revenue. My music has been rising in profile in the last few years (in terms of recognition, plaudits and big-name DJ support), but my tunes now sell less than half the units of my first ever release. It was released on vinyl, on our own label, with no meaningful distribution. We had to hand-deliver copies to record shops around the UK and it retailed for six times the price of a modern download and yet it sold as well as some big tunes manage now. This for me highlights the pressure that the industry is under.
With this massive pressure driven by low unit sales, it becomes imperative for artists to write big tunes, and equally imperative for record labels to select and release only the tunes that they are sure will be major successes. How many really great pieces of filler are getting lost in the wringer as producers and labels strive to turn every track into a dancefloor anthem?
Web forums: with clubbers and music lovers now exchanging playlists with such ease, it all seems to be about the tunes “that everyone is talking about”; which frankly is rarely going to include good filler. Again, it is going to favour the memorable tunes. Where is the DJ forum where trance DJs talk about the “tunes that no-one remembers but are fantastic for moving from tech into uplifting if you’re starting in A minor and moving into C minor”? There isn’t one.
The digital format: a.k.a “whatever happened to the B-side”? The time was that the best filler came from the B-sides of otherwise big-tune releases, but with vinyl now cast on the scrapheap, each tune stands alone. OK, tunes are released with some remixes, or with another tune to create an EP, but it’s much rarer to see a tune released with something a bit more obscure and interesting on the other side; it will tend to be the less popular of two relatively similar tunes.
Clubland: So, clubland is much smaller (particularly in the UK) than it was 10 years ago, but is very much alive and kicking. If anything it’s back to its roots as an underground movement, and that’s no bad thing. However, perhaps it does mean that the crowds are just that bit more hardcore, and so filler just isn’t needed anymore? Maybe DJs can just bend a dancefloor over their knee these days and give them an 8-hour thrashing (and if they can, you can bet they will).
The ban on smoking in public places in the UK (and elsewhere in the world) certainly doesn’t help either. DJs are now under pressure not to let up the energy even for a second, for fear of losing half the dancefloor when they all rush out to have a cigarette.
For me, this last one has been a thought for quite a while. If I think about all those classic dancefloor moments when the energy lulled, people all around me would have been lighting cigarettes, pausing and taking it all in. This just isn’t an option anymore. A smoker (and let’s face it, most clubbers are smokers, even now) has the option of dancing so hard they don’t notice, or having a fag outside. Maybe for them, filler is now a lost art.
Having said all that, I do genuinely believe trance (and dance music in general) is in a fantastic place right now, and has even benefitted from being able to play to the audience that appreciates it most. There are lot of producers out there making fantastic music and DJs crafting great sets; I enjoy DJing as much as I ever have. I guess I’m just trying to provoke some debate on different ways of crafting that musical journey.
Let the debate begin, people!
Blog #1: Ableton. It s***s all over Logic
Disturbed by this self-indulgent ranting? Hear my bleating excuses.
Right. So let’s start with the #1 most-asked question. It’s usually worded along the lines of: “What do you use to make your music? Logic?”. Such questions often go on to ask about which plugins I use to make basslines or leads or pads.
I’ll enthuse about plugins, sample libraries, synths and so on at a later date. The thing I want to talk about right now is sequencers.
Specifically, Ableton Live. Quite simply, it rocks. That’s right, I don’t use Logic. And I am aware this casts me as some sort of dangerous eccentric, so I am going to attempt to both justify myself and to suggest that you, too, should give the alternative approach a try.
I’ve tried all sorts of environments. In order: Fruityloops (albeit a much earlier version; I understand the recent versions, now called FLStudio, give just about any DAW a run for their money), Reason (soo much fun, but so limiting), Cubase SX (possibly my darkest and least productive musical period ever), Logic, a brief dalliance with Jurrane’s all-hardware setup (based on an RM1X groovebox) and now Ableton.
And I’ve never looked back.
Logic sounds lovely. It really does. But now Ableton boasts a 64-bit summing mix bus (see, I told you I was a geek), I don’t hold with the view that Logic inherently sounds better. I like to think people don’t listen to the stuff I produce and say “ooh, that sounds rough, must have been done on something other than Logic”.
No, the reason Logic sounds lovely is because it comes with some very Trance-friendly synths and plugins, or rather: synths and plugins which have been so heavily used by a generation of producers that they have become synonymous with the sound, and have thus become the target, the benchmark. And my view is that just because that’s how everyone else sounds, that’s no reason you have to sound the same.
Controversy! (Still, as I pointed out in my reply to Mat Lock’s comment, I’m not implying everyone that uses Logic sounds the same, just that achieving “that sound” is what I think people may be getting at when they think Logic sounds better, and maybe aiming for “that sound” isn’t necessarily the best thing for every aspiring producer to be doing).
So OK, one big concession I will make is that Ableton doesn’t have a built-in suite of plugins that rival what comes bundled with Logic. What it does have, though, is some very very interesting plugins. Stuff that could give your sound the edge. The Operator synth is probably one of my top 3 synths, and at first listen it sounds brittle and digital. It’s raw, it’s gutsy, and once you’ve learned how to use it, then like Native Instruments’ FM8 or other all-FM synths, you can make sounds on it that you just can’t make any other way. I could write a little introductory guide to FM synthesis soon if anyone’s interested?
It can use VSTs just the same too, and I’ve built up a big collection of fantastic synths which, I feel, more than make up for the absence of the Logic staples.
So that’s the negative side. The positive side is the compelling side. The positive side is the workflow. Ableton have designed an application which is so quick, so slick, and fits in so neatly with the loop-based composition approach, that once you’ve given it the obligatory month to try it out, you’ll never look back either. For me, starting with a kick drum and going all the way to a completed bass, kick and percussion groove, the music will never stop or glitch, once, even when adding plugins or to save. It’s magical. You’re sitting there, writing a dance track from scratch, and it feels more like playing an instrument.
Give it a try, run through the tutorial. I fully admit that people with plenty of Logic experience will be happiest to stick with the environment in which they are, doubtless, very productive. But if you’re starting out, and can afford the comparatively inflated price, you won’t regret it.
Now, knowledgeable people… feel free to comment and disagree 
