This is a brief, wordless walkthrough of one of the ways I zone in on pitched sounds in seemingly unpitched source material. Hope you find this useful!

for DjViral and the Ableton Live forum.
- oh, and sorry about the clipping. Twas a quickie.

Traces 1 - dig deep into effects; not your pocket!

The first edition of Traces focuses on arps, with 50 Arpeggiator Racks, ranging from simple beat sequences to complex melodies that can be altered in real-time. Combining the Racks with each other delivers even more sequences with literally thousands of combinations to try out. From instant glitch to subtle backgrounds. And how about using several Arpeggiator Racks at once?

New York Style compression adds extra punch and presence.  On the Ableton Forum there has been some debate as to how best to implement the approach in Ableton Live. Here's one take on it - as always go through the links by the video to get to the tasty HD on vimeo :)

And don't forget NOT to blink... this one is QUICK! 

After a recent discussion on the Ableton forum regarding the Calvin Harris "sound" I decided to try out some of the techniques involved in that lovely little track Accetable in the 80s.

The following example is done in Live7 using only Analog and a drum rack. Very simple, except for the bass sound, which I found hard to acheive using the overly resonant formant filters in there.

I had a great deal of fun on this, which means I probably ended up "grooving" more than actually reaching the same sound, but here it is, you judge for yourself.

 http://www.myspace.com/calvinharristv -should be song #2 in his player atm.

and:

My version 

and for all you live7 heads, here's what I got so far with the .als file - all sounds are included, all free, all Covert Ops (alright, and a bit of that Harris chap) 

Tension presets for Live 7 and higher.

The Covert Operators bring you their most abstract pack ever!
The "Release" pack for the Tension synth in Live 7 is more than juststrings and guitar sounds

- This Live Pack has some of the craziest sounds we've ever extracted from an Ableton Instrument.

Here's another one of those things that settled with me over the last couple of years. Originally I did this with audio samples, repitching and pendulum looping on an Akai s-950 (yes, I'm old, so what?)

HD version at vimeo - although the message does come across in this smudgy version ;-) 

Wikipedia entry on "Phasing" in musical composition 

Here's an audio example: Three nearly identical midi loops, each slightly shorter than the other. 

I have always loved the sound of a howling tape delay, and when I first got Live (version 3 at the time) it didn't take me long to start to build some of these routing structures I had previously worked with in hardware, using so called "dub mixing" techniques to send audio to delays and then manipulate the sounds within an effects feedback loop.

^^^ wow, that was a long sentence!

 Anyways, I have been rigging my machine to do HD video captures, and I think I finally nailed it. Please add any requests for future videos or comments on the quality/lack thereof, hehe. Click the first link below the video to go to vimeo if you need the HD version - cheers.