The Live Set-Up - Part 2: The Ableton Years!

So the decision to change to Ableton Live from Cubase was a massive one.

I knew about the capabilities of Live - I'd been playing around with various version of Live Lite since v4, but had never really properly got my head around how we'd transfer our songs into the Ableton way of thinking. However, to an extent, we'd already got into the whole 'songs as a series of scenes' idea, since we'd been doing loops in Cubase previously.

So the next question was one of control. With the Cubase method, we'd been using a small mixing desk to control mutes/fades for each element of the track. After some research (and friendly advice), I settled on an Evolution UC-33e. This ticked all the boxes - completely re-assignable, lots of faders, pretty robust looking... This, and a copy of Ableton Live 6, was the start of the new set up.

It was around this time that we recruited our drummer, Alex Lane. This added another problem to the mix: the drummer needs a click. Of course, this isn't really a problem - we just routed a generic Impulse drum machine playing an on-beat hi-hat in Ableton through a separate output of the sound card.

I was still running my trusty Roland JV1080 as my sound source, with piano sounds coming from my Alesis QS7. Andy was playing mostly electric guitar, and occasionally bass guitar. Owen was now a permanent fixture behind the Ableton controller, but had also added a turntable and DJ mixer to give us some scratching in the tracks that needed it. To top it all off we had a new female singer, Kay Juviler-Bacon, for a little extra flourish.

We decided it would be easier to run the effects for the vocals ourselves, to save the hassle of getting a sound guy to hook up our effects module and turning it on and off on the right tracks. This meant continuing to have an on-stage mixing console to route everything accordingly.

All these elements were giving us quite a technical headache, not least because of the amount of kit we had to lug around everywhere. We'd also faced criticism from sound guys at venues for taking too long to set up...

Investing in cases and cables is always a difficult choice. I mean, it's great spending loads of money on things that make great noises, or things covered in big knobs or flashing lights, but cases and cables are just things that make other more exciting things work better. It's a bit like trying to get excited about buying a new headlight bulb for your Ferrari.

Anyway, I had a case custom made for me by the Flightcase Warehouse - 12U top for the mixer, and 6U front and back for equipment. In this was a Yamaha MG166CX mixer, a Phonic PPC8000E power conditioner (for power distribution), a Behringer HA4700 headphone amp, a TC Electronic M350 effects processor, a Behringer 8-way DI rack and my trusty M-Audio Quattro. This flightcase was internally cabled up, including power, so that all that was needed was for the few external connections to be made into the mixer. The DI rack had a 6m XLR loom on it for connection to the venue sound rig. This whole beast came to be known affectionately as the Mega Box. It just about fitted in the car...

Additionally, I bought a Gigskinz Laptop Rack Bag with its own 3U of rack space. This held my old Dell laptop and my Roland JV1080. I LOVE these cases, and would heartily recommend them for anyone who uses a few bits of rack kit with their laptop on stage. They're hard-wearing, have a good sized side pocket, large rear access through a separately zipped opening and an access hole between the rack bit and the laptop bit, so things can be cabled up easily. Genius.

This was the complete set up until I made some down-sizing changes early this summer, and worked a treat - apart from the missions of having to lug the Mega Box around. For the first time ever in our gigging history, we had a reliable, easy-to-use, quick-to-set-up system that allowed us to deliver a quality show without worrying about the 'how' of it all.

That on-stage kit list in full:

Main Stuff:

Dell Laptop running Ableton Live 6

M-Audio Quattro soundcard

Evolution UC33e MIDI Controller

Yamaha MG166CX mixing console

TC Electronic M350 effects processor

Behringer HA4700 headphone amp

Behringer 8-way DI rack

Phonic PPC8000E power conditioner

Custom 12Ux6U flight case

Matt's Stuff:

Alesis QS7

Roland JV1080

Andy's Stuff:

Yamaha electric guitar

A borrowed bass guitar

Owen's Stuff:

Technics SL1210

Erm... some sort of DJ mixer!

Next time I'll detail how we do things now, after deciding the Mega Box was a little too Mega after all!

Studio History: The Eat More Cake Years

So I guess it's time I wrapped up the studio history series. It seems somehow fitting that I should be doing this a matter of days after the studio has been packed away again!

So I moved home from Aberdeen about six months after my 21st birthday. My band, Charlotte Says, had long since ground to a halt and I hadn't written a song in earnest for ages. On my return home I got a part time job so I could spend two days a week pulling in a bit of pocket money, and the rest of the time pretending to be a musician!

My studio was lacking some pretty essential components at this point, so I spent time scouring free ads papers like Loot looking for bargains. (Largely, this meant sitting in the pub reading newspapers, which was a dream job really!) In the end, the good deals came from an entirely different source: perennial bargain merchants, Behringer.

Now whatever your opinion of Behringer and their products, their value for money is exceedingly high - especially when beginners are looking to expand quickly without spending their worldly savings. At the time that I moved home, they had a particularly interesting package deal that consisted of:

1 x 32-channel Eurodesk mixing console

5 x cheap condenser mics

2 x eq filter/feedback destroyers/de-essers

1 x 2 channel compressor

1 x limiter

1 x Digital EQ

1 x FX unit

All of a sudden, my studio had substance.

I was quickly becoming frustated with the 15 second limit of my Akai S01 sampler, so I also added a second-hand Akai S3000XL sampler. This gave me huge scope to change the way I worked. Now I could sample myself playing whole guitar tracks. I could layer even more drum loops. At one point, I even took a set of mics to a mate's place and multi-sampled his drum kit! I started taking samples of old 7" records - the sky was the limit!

One final major change marked this period in the studio's history: I finally retired the Atari ST and switched to running Cubase VST 3.5 on a PC.

And so it came to pass that a cheeky upstart named Andrew Briggs persuaded me to let him come round and write a dance tune using my studio. The song was toilet, but it marked the start of an unlikely writing partnership that became the band that we know and love to this day.

The studio remained pretty much unchanged for the next couple of years. Working with Andy really started me using the kit in my studio to its potential - especially in those early pre-digital audio days. The Akai S3000XL was the focus of most things, with other sounds provided mostly by the Roland JV1080. I bought the FX card for the Akai so we had more creative control over the samples and we used to spend hours drawing automation curves into Cubase to control filter sweeps, etc.

The next thing to eventually change was the mixer - the Behringer desk was great value, but the power supply was temperamental (it would sometimes blow 6 fuses before I finally switched on...) and the routing wasn't the most flexible. I bought an ex-demo 32-channel Mackie 8-bus, which was HUGE but amazing. This was my pride and joy, and a real head-turner in a bedroom studio like mine...

A few other things followed - I bought a Novation A-Station off current band member Owen, I replaced the two-channel Behringer compressor with a 4-channel Behringer one (!!), and I replaced the barely-adequate PC with a rack-mounted high-spec jobby from Digital Village. I also got more racks, patch panels and cables, external hard disks, and the studio was finally as well equipped a home studio as I could have hoped for.

With a high-spec PC, I started exploring virtual instruments. I bought a copy of Rebirth, which I loved. We'd make beats on Rebirth, then sample the individual hits onto the Akai to process them and put the beat back together in Cubase. Rebirth was the source of the majority of our drum sounds until I purchased Native Instruments' Battery 2, which in turn fuelled the start of my obsession with VSTs, along with the beginning of the end for all our outboard gear...

And that's about that. From here on in, it became a virtual world, with VSTs replacing rack-mounted sound modules and FX units gathering dusts un-patched. And that is a whole other story to tell.

The final studio kit list in full:

Mixing Desks:

Behringer Eurodesk 3282

Mackie 32 8-bus

Keyboards:

Alesis QS7

Yamaha SY85

Yamaha SY22

Roland U20

Sound Modules/Samplers:

Roland JV1080

Korg 01R/W

Novation A-Station

Yamaha TG55

Akai S3000XL

Akai S01

Sound Processing/FX:

Behringer Suppressor (x2)

Behringer Limiter

Behringer Ultracurve Pro

Behringer Virtualizer Pro

Behringer Multicom Pro

Roland RSS-10

TC Electronics M350

Several Behringer Patch Panels

Computer:

Digital Village-built 2.0GHz Pentium 4, 4GB RAM, 150GB System drive, 500GB audio drive

120GB external Glyph audio drive

2 x 17" CRT monitors

Other:

Phillips CD player

Sony Minidisc player

Alesis Monitor Ones

Alesis RA100 Reference Amp

Peavey T-60 electric Guitar

Jasmine by Takamine electro-acoustic guitar

Vox Standard bass guitar

Aberdeen - The Studio Moves North

I lived in Aberdeen for two and a half years between the ages of 18 and 20.

My first flatmate, Alan Newman, who also happened to be a work colleague and drinking buddy, was a guitarist and together with his bassist friend Wayne Parley and a female singer, Jo McCafferty, we formed my first 'proper' band Charlotte Says. We were a kind of 'Faith No More meets Skunk Anansie' rock/electronic affair which proved quite popular among audiences normally treated to Radiohead-impersonating local bands...

We went through an assortment of drummers, eventually deciding they were all too unreliable. By the end of our time all the backline was provided by me and my Atari ST.

My studio gear expanded quite a bit during this period. First of all, I needed some better amplification than the little Hitachi stereo I'd been using previously, so I purchased a pair of Alesis Monitor Ones, and a matching Alesis RA100 amp, which are my monitors of choice to this day.

Next, the limitations of a 61-key keyboard were beginning to show as I constructed more elaborate 'multi' patches with many split zones for playing on stage. I purchased a 76-key Alesis QS7 (which I still use on stage), partly on the strength of its piano sounds and partly for the semi-weighted larger keyboard. I still love the touch of this keyboard - not too heavy for synthy-type sounds, yet enough responsiveness to create the kind of tonal variations you need when playing a piano sound.

The sounds of my SY22, U20 and TG55 were beginning to wear thin, especially since I was still a preset junkie, so my last two purchases were sound modules to expand my palette. First, I purchased a Korg 01R/W (an 01/W workstation in a box) off a guy I worked with (I think his name was Charles, and I think he was from Fife. Either way, I do remember that he was a demon harmonica player who used to whip out his harp on nights out and wow drunken audiences...). The Korg had a built-in sequencer, so I used that in rehearsals for a while to provide beats while we wrote songs.

Next, my most important purchase, and one that would be the core of my choices of sounds for many years to come: a Roland Super JV-1080. This box is amazing - huge polyphony, 16 part multis, a massive (and outstanding) range of sounds (especially for its time) and expandable. I added the Bass and Drums expansion card, and (much later) the Orchestra II and Pianos cards. Nearly every pro studio I've been in during my time has had a JV1080 or 2080 sat in the corner somewhere. It is a proper daddy amongst sound modules...

The other important thing about Aberdeen was that I made my first unnecessary purchase - a keyboard I'd hankered after since I saw it in the showroom when I purchased my first keyboard: a second-hand Yamaha SY85. To this day, I've never used it to its potential. There are a few key sounds I've used in tracks, and I did some experiments with dumping samples from my Akai to it via a MIDI cable, but mostly its sat gathering dust in the studio. Having said that, it was a sturdy beast of a box, so I used it as my second keyboard on stage.

At this time I was still running my Atari, and still running Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four. Even on stage. In fact, pretty much my whole studio came with us when we played.

The Aberdeen Years Studio kit list in full:

Keys:

Yamaha SY22

Yamaha SY85

Roland U20

Alesis QS7

Sound Modules/Samplers:

Korg 01R/W

Roland JV-1080

Akai S01

Other:

Alesis RA100

Alesis Monitor Ones

Studiomaster Diamond Club 16:2 Mixing Desk

The world's biggest 3-tier Quiklok stand...

In my next post, I'll move back home, form a band called Eat More Cake and start making some proper music!

But first, some history.

Our studio had a humble beginning. A very humble beginning. I first began making electronic music with a Yamaha PSR37 (NB: that's not me in the video) hooked up to an Atari Mega ST2, running Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four.

The PSR was no good for anything other than dire synth music. Not even synth pop - just electronic arse-music. So I soon replaced it with my first synth - a Yamaha SY22. I loved this synth, and it opened up a whole new world of sound creation, etc. However, I just continued making awful music with the SY22's presets...


I made a few tunes with a school chum called Steve Kielty (continuing the 'link everything' theme, I wonder if it's this Steve Kielty?). We listened to hardcore and wrote bad imitations. There was one tune we wrote that used a specific patch from one of his keyboards - on the strength of this one sound (Shakuhachi), I bought one for myself. A Roland U20.


So now I had two very different keyboards, a wealth of sounds, and so I started writing more filmic, atmospheric stuff. The problem with this set up was beats - nothing I had so far made any decent drum noises. So the next addition to the studio had to be a sampler. I bought a second-hand Akai S01 and thus began the real start of my musical journey.


Since sample CDs were expensive, and the Internet was still called 'books', I relied on the Future Music cover CDs as the source of my samples. As a result, I would write in whatever style that particular month's CD had samples of. One month it was jungle breaks, the next edition would be pop-funk, etc.


About this time, Tricky won the Mercury prize with Maxinquaye, while Portishead's Dummy and Earthling's Radar were never off my CD player. This was the first time a musical genre had ever wholly captivated me. I started writing trip-hop-esque tunes (including the original version of our very own Music Box), bought one more sound module (a Yamaha TG55 - again, off the strength of one or two patches - Modomatic and St.Michael) and the studio in this guise would be the basis of my studio for a good while to come.



The original studio kit list in full:


Atari Mega ST2
Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four III
Yamaha SY22
Roland U20
Yamaha TG55
Akai S01
Sudiomaster Diamond Club 16-2 mixing desk
Hitachi Stereo


AFTERTHOUGHT: I've just read this post back - this is what I meant when I said that this blog might end up a bit of a geeky vanity project. Hopefully in my next post, I will waffle less and maybe say something interesting!