Started messing around with ReWire today, man I love it, big up to the Renoise devs for implementing it. Now I can use both of my fav music applications at the same time. Which are, in case someone hasn’t been paying attention, Cubase and Renoise.
Recorded a short vid of my first attempt.. the result of it at least, a quick beat mock-up. I didn’t think about recording until I had had already made the beat and merged all the cuts and whatnot, so it doesn’t look like much… But hey! ReWire!!!!
Yesterday I talked about how you could use AutoHotkey to improve and speedup your computer use in general, but today I thought I’d show how it can be useful for making/playing music. Something more in line with what I usually write about. It’s nothing fancy and quite basic, I re-bound the Channel Mute keys in Renoise, which are Control + 0-9 on the keypad as default. What I did was remove the need to hold down the Control key so I could just hit the numbers on the keypad, and I bound several channel mutes together so I could press say 7 on the keypad and mute all hi-hats in one go.
Check the pic for a full view of the script including some notes (or grab it here, just open it in notepad), it’s a very simple AHK script that use the built in command SendInput to send key presses to the active window.
Also you can check the video (HD version on Vimeo as usual) where I try to use my brand new key-bindings, try is the keyword here lol. I didn’t practice any so I’m not exactly tight. The tune is just some lofi, glitchy thing I threw together. This specific script will only work with this songs layout, so you’ll have to make one for each song, unless you use the same layout on all your songs.
I made a drop over at drop.io a week or so ago where I could put up new beats and beats in progress, I only tweeted.. twittered.. err.. twat..? Anyways, I talked about it on twitter and forgot to mention it here. So I thought it was about time I did. I’ve been going through some experimental phase lately, it might not sound like it to some, but I’ve been doing things in ways I’ve never really done before, which means some of them sound a bit different then usual. I also went back to my beat making roots for one, which was kinda fun :) It was a beat for last weeks LouisDen Beat Battle in which you had to assume the personality of another producer. I chose True Master, for those of you who remember him. Really wanna see the video from that LDBB and get a proper listen to what peeps did.
I’ll put up the beat previews and the beats in progress here as well, so you can listen right away without having to switch page. I haven’t decided if I should make a playlist-player or just use the regular one-mp3-per-player. Maybe I should go with the playlist, that way I could put it in any future posts without any hassle. All previews are 128kbps transcoded mp3s, that means low quality. Latest ones are on top. And as I said, most of them are works in progress.
The True Master one is Stars In Their Eyes for those wondering.
The guys from the Creative Juices camp just put up a public forum, so if you interested in chatting them up, get the latest info or just lurk around, head over and show some love. Already a bunch of topics and people over there, even tho they just fired it up yesterday. Even some accapellas up for remixing.. that we like!
I’m not much of a forum person myself (or a very social person for that matter heh), but I’ll be lurking around there in the shadows. See y’all around!
Another short one, could have made it even shorter tho if the capture program allowed me to edit it without messing things up. So sorry for the dead-time in it here and there.
Oh and yeah, parts of this is made to import the vocals into Renoise later on (i.e. the cutting bit). Just ignore that if you’re not using Renoise. An if you’re using Logic or something else, I’m sure there are corresponding steps you can take there.
1. Line up the original tune (I’m not gonna show you how to count bpm… go google) to it’s bpm. Make sure it’s tight all the way through, which might take a little trial-and-error. If you can’t get it tight all the way .. well that’s a whole other video.
2. Line up the accapella with the original tune, and make sure that stays tight throughout as well.
3. Make a note of the original bpm and then change it to what you need it to be.
4. Timestretch the vocals to you bpm of choice, try to keep it relatively close to the original, or it will sound like shite. (no need to do the beat, only did it to make it easier to hear for the vid). As you see on the vid, Cubase has an original/input bpm value and an output one in the timestretch dialogue, that’s why we noted down the starting bpm before. Make sure both have the correct value.
5. Cut the vocals up into manageable pieces, and check the beginning so it doesn’t start early, like it does in the vid. If you forget, the intro will go off beat, and we don’t want that.
6. Bounce the individual parts down and rename them to something useful.
Just a quick vid showing Beatslaughers suggestion on how to cut long samples/vocals in Renoise so you dont have to scroll all the way back to the top again to trigger it.
You will however need to line the sample up in its proper bpm first, I might do another little vid showing some basic timestretching and cutting using Cubase later on.
I made a 