This tutorial is made in Ableton Live and using most of its internal resources unless otherwise specified.

Ingredients

• A basic polyphonic synth
• Delay
• Reverb
• Chorus
• EQ & Compressor

Getting started

Before tweaking the synth and setting up the effects, a few word about chords and scales. Most music styles have their own mood and character usually derived from scales that the artists use. The most prominent one in dub-related genres is the minor scale (for those not firm with scales, here’s a very handy tool for learning them). While many of you may slap their heads shouting “OBVIOUS!” there are lots of artists that go mad trying to find the right sound by browsing through their synths, ending up in forums asking for hints on producing certain sounds, because they weren’t lucky. It’s due to the fact that very, very often, the biggest sounds are made up from most easiest synth-presets played the right way.

The synth sound

So, the sound we’re after is a short and stabby one, usually with fast attacking volume and filter envelope as well as short decay and release. In order to put the filter envelope in charge it’s necessary to take the filter cutoff down and raise the filter envelope amount to its max. The synth i’m using for this is the free TAL Uno-62. As you can hear it doesn’t sound fancy at all, but as soon as you play for example a C-minor chord from the lower octaves, the dubish mood is already in place.

Download audio file (sound_1.mp3)

Adding effects

The chorus comes in first to widen the signal and breathe some life into the rather static sound. I’ll be using Live’s internal one without tweaking it much and place the EQ Eight directly behind it. The equalizer is used to shape the sound rather  than using it to fit into the mix. The first band lowers the bass, the second notches the mid frequencies slightly and the third band stresses the highs.

Download audio file (sound_2.mp3)

Delay – i’m using Live’s Ping Pong Delay for this using 1/6th delay time and leave it alone for the moment. Next up is the reverb which needs some tweaking. We’re looking for a long decayed verb with a broad and lush sound. Live’s internal one is fine again, the one you’re using should have options for filtering the input signal, additional controlover the diffusion damping would be handy as well.

The reverb produces the foundation for the soundlayer which carries the delay effect, thus the input filtering should take care about the high frequencies and cut them off. If your reverb of choice doesn’t have have parameters for this you can also put it on a send channel and place a in front of it. That’ll do the job as well.

Download audio file (sound_3.mp3)

Last not least insert a compressor to glue the sound and effects together, i’m proceeding with Live’s internal one. Lower the threshold to around 7db below the peak of the incoming signal to give it some beef to work with. Second important setting is the release, since it’s a long decaying sound we’re dealing with it should be rather long in order to prevent thumping. Ratio of 1:3 (or in Live 3.00) is fine. You can alter the attack setting to your liking, got it at ~30ms here to stress the initial sound a bit more. It’s rather subtle at first but as soon as you’re playing around with the effects it’s necessary to have a compressor that keeps the effects in place.

Download audio file (sound_4.mp3)

Above technique could be used to create for example stuff like this:

Download audio file (sound_5.mp3)

but it’s also a solid foundation for any kind of chord and stab found in electronic dance music. As far as the story goes, this is a really basic and easy way to get started. I’d love to elaborate further on this topic but i better not make a promise since putting this one online already took me ages (hello lazyness)…

UPDATE

Here’s an Ableton Live project file with a few variations of above created sound. And my free pack with samples and loops is still available as well.

The last clicks

Since you’re probably the same kind of sucker for Dubtechno that i am, feel free to grab these mixes:

Music for grey days,
Tracks for dark days and/or my podcast for Bio-Mechanics.

PS: don’t forget to tell your friends.

Ronny

Summary of changes: More complete undo/redo. Native event- and MIDI-connections. Feedback loops. Includes ca 20 new Lunar and native/MIDI plugins. Overall enhanced MIDI support. Improved native recorder and streaming plugins. Can load/preview a bunch of new sample formats via sndfile, e.g FLAC, IFF, VOC. Pattern editors can be duplicated and linked. The machine view can move/align machines w/keyboard, added new “Smart delete” function and other context menu options. The wave editor supports copy/paste, and the context menu works.
Contributors to this release were Calvin, Hmaon, Ld0d, Syncat, Zeffii and Zoner.

Buzé is available for low @ Batman.no.

More images, further info and last not least the download. Have fun terrorizing people on the bus, train, in the office…

If a machine crashes right now it just doesn’t kill the entire Buzz, it’s being marked as crashed so you know what you may have done wrong or which gear you should prevent using. You’ll even have the chance of saving your work. Thank god Oskari for that! There are also a few fancy things like anti aliased connections, shadows and some more detail improvements.

But worth more than that is the new enthusiasm inside the Buzzscene. I don’t know any other apps which survived such a long time without hope for further development but many buzz machine devs never gave up and kept going and going and going. These news are like the first rain drops in the desert after a long heat period.

/me sings “it’s raining code – hallelulja” and looks forward to the things to come. In hope the rain doesn’t stop too early…

Kudos Oskari.

I consider myself being one of the early birds using DJ software (namely Traktor due to several reasons) after spining vinyls for more than 10 years. Luckily testing Final Scratch to the bone and back i decided to either carry records OR use a laptop with Traktor but not both at the same time. It’s certainly been a matter of preference and not technical issues which led me this way. When using the software i’d like to control as many aspects of it as possible. Once you took a box of records, a bag with laptop and additional midi controllers to a venue, realizing there is simply no space for your setup, especially the midi controller(s) you may fall the same direction. Thus leaving the records home wouldn’t really improve the situation.

In contrary to the controller of my dreams the recent devices slip away further and further by technical design. The bigger the jogwheel, the merrier the marketing efforts. Dear product designers – WHY? In which way do jogwheels improve anything for digital DJ’s?

Most of the ones on midi controllers don’t have a motor on their own thus they don’t spin, that kinda spoils the entire “huh, i’m touching an actual vinyl” experience. Ah – i should use the joghweel to cue through my music like using the shelf on a record? Let’s face it: it’s not that any there would be any mp3s that containing several tracks at once. Apart from that almost every DJ application has a cue marker where it jumps to after loading a file. Even if there are people using let’s say 5 to 10 cue points in a single track skipping between them doesn’t really demand a jogwheel for operation. They’re often even too unprecise to not jump over the point one’s heading to.

What’s left? Scratching! Hands up, how many digital DJ’s actually scratch? Shooting in the dark i’d say maybe 3 out of 100. If you, the product designers would actually like to sell your controller to any of those 3 you’d most probably get the physics of a spinning turntable emulated straight in your product which usually isn’t the case. Using the jogwheel for pitchbend goes into the same category for me. No go.

I employed the touch sensitive pads of my Axiom 61 to take care of pitchbends. They do the job with such a high accuracy and precision i could never reach with my hands on an actual vinyl, not even thinking about the rather sluggish realized lot of jogwheels on midi controllers.

Dear industry – it may be fun for you to tell people to buy your fancy vinyl-look-alike DJ controllers but maybe you could get rid of that idea and develop something that simply doesn’t waste space in first place? Once your customers realize there are better ways to get in control of DJ applications they’ll throw your products back at you. Or maybe you could invest some time and get your jogwheels straight at behaving like a vinyl at a smaller scale.

Now -

if you think i missed a certain aspect which is highly important – let me know!

if you believe your jogwheel driven midi controller kicks ass the way it is, i’d love to check it out! Yes, i’m negative about the concept but due to negative experience with it. You’re invited to convince me of the opposite!

Sincerly,
Ronny

Link to Hobnox Audiotool

(“What are you talking about?” > Hobnox Audiotool @ rp.de

The thing i’m talking about is the “piano room”, part of a web application called “chord house” at looknohands.com. It’s an interactive music theory tool about chords and scales, covering lots of regular scales found in western music but also a huge number of exotic ones from all over the world. There’s a fair amount of websites and apps around in this regard, what makes this one specifically interesting is its ability to let the user select i.e. a chord and then play it back as audio. You can either choose to play an individual chord or a scale up and down, using several instruments (various pianos, organs and synths) and even save the file as wav.

Those seeking for an answer on how to make dubstabs for example should look at the harmonic minor scale and its chords, it’ll probably open your eyes in just a few minutes. There’s probably something to discover for everyone, so don’t bother checking it out.

Link to “chord house – piano room”

ERRR WHAT? Insane! Above screenshot shows a little application called Hobnox Audiotool that runs in your browser. Yep, like, in your browser! April fool? No way.What we got here must be the work of some crazy madmen, couldn’t yet find further info. Whatever, you’ve got direct access to two 303s, a 909 and two times seven effects. Namely: detune, delay, pitched delay, flanger, reverb, equalizer and a distortion. You can route audio around freely through those effects, the 909 instrument outputs are accessible individually for more fun. I heard somebody talking about an 808, however couldn’t spot it so far.

The sound is decent, okay, the 303 emulation can’t be regarded very spot on, however it’s just fun, fun, fun. On top, the pre-programmed pattern contain some absolute alltime classics such as Acid Over, What time is love, Public Energy, In from the night and whatnot. Absolutely sick!!!!

Here’s how it sounds, whipped up in a minute using presets:

[flash http://www.ronnypries.de/sounds/hobnox.mp3 w=250 h=0]

And a 1600×1200 screenshot

Gotta go, the knobs are waiting!

Shit, wait – here’s the link