Ableton Live Suite 8! Woop!

So I managed to justify the cost. Sort of. To myself (and my credit card) at least...

Thanks to Ableton's 10-year anniversary 20% off sale, I am now the proud owner of Ableton Live Suite 8. Just finished downloading all 1.5+GB of it and am now decidedly excited about getting home and putting it on my Mac. Woo-hoo!

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of upgrading. I'd been thinking about it for a while, since I was still running version 6 on stage, and I don't like being too far behind the times. Also, now our main Cubase-running studio PC is not in my project studio, I wanted to embrace a new way of working in a new environment, rather than just using something else to do the same job (same plugins, same workflows, etc.). Live Suite seemed to be the sensible way forward, and I can still run my old favourite VSTs if necessary through Ableton.

So I'm a happy bunny, and I'm also looking forward to seeing if a new software environment will change the way I've been writing recently. A lot of the ideas that came out of my project set-up were too big, too loud, too tired. I was writing on autopilot: make beat, add layer, add usual compression with usual settings, send to group, add usual saturation plugins, add more layers, add usual reverb, etc...

I'll keep you posted - maybe I'll even post some snippets of the ideas that come out of my first writing sessions with Ableton. Watch this space!

Project Studios - A Change of Plan...

Andy and I are a bit like treacle sponge and custard - individually, we're still worthy of note but together we're much, much better...

And so after a few months of non-work, non-creativity, and non-progress we've re-shuffled our project studios. Again.

We now have our original main studio PC (complete with all our important plugins/sounds) at Andy's, in a room where we can both work together sensibly. It's this ability to work together that has been lacking recently - whilst we can write new stuff in our own separate spaces, without the opportunity to come together we've been unable to finish any new tracks, do any remixes, reworkings of old stuff, etc... Everything we'd been doing over the previous 6 months had ground to a halt, but now we are back in business!

Andy's still got his mobile ProTools rig, and I've got Ableton running at mine, so we still have our own even smaller project studios to work in as well. (However the transition from writing in Cubase to writing in Ableton for me will be an interesting change. Am trying to justify the upgrade to Live 8 Suite at the moment to aid my progress while the 20% sale is on!)

Anyway, we had our first studio session together in around 3 months last night and we were cracking on with a remix we've been hoping to get round to for AGES. Sounding heavyweight too - should be a good one. Hopefully, there's still enough time for us to finish it up - it's a forthcoming release on UrbanTorque, so it would be nice to get on board.

Meanwhile, we're putting together the finishing touches for the follow up to Red Sky, a completely free release of an old favourite track of ours. More details of this to follow soon!

2010 is our year. If you haven't already, pop over to your favourite digital download store and pick up a copy of Red Sky (Part 1 and Part 2), spread the word and if you make just one new year's resolution this year, let it be 'Eat More Cake'!

Studio... Gone!

Hey, bloggy people. Sorry for the radio silence - thought I had swine flu, but ended up with a mental tummy bug instead. Either way, I've been knocked out since mid-last week so I'll attempt to get you up to speed in this post.

The old studio is finally no more. Yesterday, I put the 'spare' kit in storage and this morning I took apart the benching. It is now a bare room again... *sniff*

The project studio has made a few advances. First off, I got hold of an 18" LCD monitor so I'm back to having the amount of desktop real-estate I crave. Next, I found a product called ipMIDI, which is a very quick and easy way of adding an ethernet MIDI connection between computers. Now I can have my PC running Cubase, whilst my Mac runs some of the more powerful VSTs (like QLSO, for example) and all I need to do is plug a standard network crossover cable between them. Brilliant!

I've also added an E-MU 0202 soundcard that I had lying around for the Mac to use. This way I don't have to worry about using any of the stuff that's 'reserved' for live use and the 0202 can stay plugged into the mixer. Finally, I've re-arranged things a bit so there's more room for my external hard disks, etc.

So that's as much work as I'm planning on doing on the studio for the moment. Everything is working nicely now and I can certainly get on with everything I need to. The only thing I'm missing is some decent headphones. For now, I'm working exclusively on headphones, so I need something that's comfortable, light, flat EQ and not bank-breaking. I always used to use a set of Fostex T7's, but they've blown in one ear, so everything bassy is accompanied by a grizzly noise in my right lughole. Any recommendations greatly appreciated. I don't really want to spend more than about £50...

There's a few more things to talk about, but I reckon they're all worth their own posts, so from the 'studio move' posts, this is it!

The new studio takes shape!

Having finished exporting stems for all our works in progress, I've finally started setting up the project studio.

Originally, I had planned to use a keyboard stand to put my master keyboard on, then plonk the computer somewhere on the existing computer desk (my 'general use' Dell desktop is also in the corner of the new room). My other worry was trying to find a home in storage for all the stuff left behind, so I eventually decided to bring some racks through to the new studio and use them as a keyboard stand instead. I brought through two Quiklok 10U racks on casters, one under each end of my M-Audio Keystation Pro88.

Keeping some rack space is a bonus - it means I can keep my (rackmounted) PC off the flimsy existing computer desk, plus I've still got some space to put other equipment in if I need to. At the moment, the space above my PC contains my ESI Wami Rack soundcard and an old Roland RSS-10.

The RSS-10 is an interesting bit of kit - interesting in that I've had it for around 4 years (I long-term borrowed it off a friend of mine named, coincidentally, Roland!) and have never once switched it on! It's a 'sound space processor', and gives the impression of stereo sounds appearing to be in a 3-dimensional space. For example, the demo I heard on a cover CD once had a helicopter sound, which sounded like it was flying around your head - not just stereo panning, but virtual 3D panning! So anyway, I left that in the project studio in the hope that I might actually switch it on and see what it can do...

The other rack is currently holding my Yamaha MG166CX mixer - I knew I'd find room for it somewhere! How much use it'll get I don't know, but it's a big bit of kit to find room for in the storage unit.

There's enough room on my chest of drawers (god bless bedroom studios!) for my Macbook Pro, but I'm a monitor down, since I can't really fit the 17" CRT monitors from my old studio anywhere. It's amazing how quickly you get used to multiple screens, and how irritating it is when you have to downsize. I'm thinking I might have to buy a cheap LCD monitor so that I've still got enough space to have the arrangement, mixer and any relevant VSTs open all at the same time in Cubase. (Yes, I'm still using Cubase. There's probably a whole other blog post there, but avid readers will remember that I've been a Steinberg aficionado since around 1991!)

Since my Macbook far out-performs my studio PC, and has most of my biggest virtual instruments installed on it already, I'm toying with the idea of using some kind of MIDI-over-ethernet trick to use it as a remote VST station, while my PC worries about running Cubase. I'd need something cross-platform, since one end is Windows and one end is OS X, so I'll have a look into that at some point. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know!

Anyway, the studio is working enough that I've managed to start work on another remix. More on that later, once I've got something to show for it. In the meantime, have a picture of the new studio (apologies for quality - iPhone is amazing, but not at taking photos...).

Saturday's gig and more studio packing

Great gig on Saturday. Unfortunately Kay was ill, so we had to switch to our emergency four-piece set list. Didn't seem to matter too much (though Ever So Gently was a bit ropey), and we had some good feedback from the crowd.

The Lexington was a nice surprise - a big, wide stage for a change and a huge sound system! Also, and probably most importantly, we had a sound engineer who really knew his stuff, ran a tight soundcheck and gave us great sound both on and off stage. I didn't catch his name, but I did make a point of thanking him after the show...

We spent quite a while in the green room chatting to the band that were on before us, Sleeping With Antares. I really enjoyed their set - yet more proof of the good sound engineering - which had me reminiscing in parts of the wall-of-noise sounds of bands from the early nineties like My Bloody Valentine and Ride at their most shoegazey, but with some distinctly modern riffs and strong vocals. Nice guys to boot, so good luck to them. They've recently launched their eponymous EP, which they gave me a copy of, so check them out if you get a chance!

On the studio front, I've decided to lend Andy some of the stuff out of the old studio, since it seems to make more sense than putting it in storage. Plus, he has a dearth of usable sounds in his project set-up. He's taken the Novation A-Station, my beloved JV-1080 and my Alesis Monitors (no room for monitors in my new set-up - am I going to have to write everything on headphones?). I offered him my small mixer as well, but he doesn't have room. I'm thinking I should probably hold on to that for the moment anyway, but I don't know where the hell I'm going to put it either!

Anyway, tonight I'll be setting up my project studio so I will post tomorrow with a report, maybe some photos and also (no doubt) a shopping list of things I'm going to need!

Works in progress

So the main thing that needs to be done before I break down the studio completely is to make sure we've got all the parts of all the tracks we want to continue to work on.

Since most of the outboard kit in my studio is pretty much redundant these days, we should be able to carry on with tunes already in progress, and also with remixes, new tracks etc. purely in a 'virtual' environment.

Andy and I wrote a list the other week of any old song ideas that had not been finished, that we thought were too good to throw away:

I appreciate that you probably can't read that very well, so allow me to help. The list contains such classics as 'New Dark Thingy', 'Little Man in a Box', and 'Cuthbert and Timoblourgh Go to the Round Pig'. I'm sure I could write a whole other post about our working titles for tracks - we'll save that for another time...

Anyway, since my beautiful (but far too big) Mackie 32 8-bus console has already gone into storage, I've had to set up the little Yamaha MG16CX that I used to use on stage for the moment. After re-routing a few cables, I've got a functional studio again, for the moment.

Working through the list of tracks, it's interesting to see how 'developed' a song needs to be before we consider it a viable idea. I mean, some of these tracks are little more than an 8-bar loop of a riff and a beat yet some others have 20+ tracks and a complete arrangement.

I've exported stems for the first two song so far and there's another 10 to go before I can finally dismantle the studio and move my project set up.

Next time, I'll finish the history lesson of the studio - even if only for my own wistful, reminiscing benefit!