So this morning I was playing around with my camera, and a lens i borrowed, a nice 17mm that lets you take a quite wide angle on your images.
Well anyway, I took some pictures of my little studio and published them on my facebook, which was a big mistake as now I’m flooded with questions about my setup.
So I decided to take a little time to write on my dusty and unupdated blog, and talk about how I make all that stuff work.
So the core of the whole studio is of course my MacBook Pro and Logic Pro 9.
Whoevers following me on facebook or twitter has surely read about my huge excitement a few days ago when I upgraded to my current Mac, a powerful i7 2.66ghz with 4 gb of RAM. Someone (and I was one of them) might find it odd using a laptop to produce music (it’s not the easiest thing I admit that) but I had to deal with it when it was the only thing I had to produce was a laptop and now (after 4 tracks on Anjunabeats produced on a MacBook pro) I can assure that even laptops do the job in a brilliant way.
There is another great feature on my MacBook pro that I didn’t intentionally mention yet, which is the display….damn laptop and those 15″ you will say (I do)…. a single plugin interface can barely fit sometimes, I’ll let you just imagine how i was working with over 100 channels during the making of caffeine or any other track/remix released in 2009/10.  Well that ammmmmazing machine which is my new Mac has a hi-res display which gives me 30% of extra space in the same 15″, now, I might be anal with computers but believe me, spending that extra 100 bucks on such a display was a hell of a good choice!!!!  i can see something like 10-15 more channels on a logic project, plugins do not take 80% of my space, and even if you would never say it a spacey area will drastically speed up your workflow.

But let’s get back to my whole setup (watching the amount of txt I already wrote just talking about my Mac I’m seriously thinking of splitting this thing in a few parts), audio inputs and outputs are managed by the excellent  apogee duet, a small yet powerful audio interface, features 2 outputs and 4 inputs + headphones monitoring.
Apogee is well known for the quality of its converters, they are indeed some of the highest standard in the market and I can confirm whether recording or playback, the sound is awesome.
As you can see from the various pictures of my studio, I have a few magic boxes, also known as hardware synthesizers, precisely i own : Roland JP 8000 (the blue keyboard on the left of the mac), Clavia Nordlead 2 (the red one) and an Access Virus Ti Snow (the white little one).
This last one has its own usb to plug in the mac and a plugin that works in logic (and any other sequencer) that makes it easy to play and control from the mac, while the other 2  synth need a MIDI device that will allow data swap between the instruments and the computer.
In my case it’s just a small m-audio midisport 2 ins and 2 outs connected with the mac thru usb.
Another very important thing is of course the midi keyboard, in my case midi keyboard and midi controller, what I have in the studio is a massive M-Audio Axiom-61, heaps of keys (you guessed it, their are 61) and plenty of midi assignable faders and knobs, great to control logic and plugin parameters straight from the keyboard and by touching them with hands instead of by mouse (that I can assure you, makes a little difference).

Now of course all this stuff has to be plugged in somehow, every synth (apart from the Virus TI in USB mode where the USB cable does both, communication and audio streaming job) has a minimum of 3 cables, 2 audio going out from the Output of the synthesizer to the Input of the Apogee duet, and a midi cable, going out from the Output port of the m-audio midisport into the input of the synth so the audio cables will let recording our synth into logic, and the midi cable will let us control the synth from logic.
There is even the possibility to connect the MIDI output of the synthesizer into the MIDI input of our interface, this is useful when we want to save patches from our hardware to the computer or when we want to know which MIDI control is assigned to a specific parameter (cutoff, release, adsr etc…).
So this is how the mac gets and sends various signals to all the external devices, I hope it’s clear for all those who were confused seeing the pictures I posted.
Now since this post has become a couple of kilometers long I decided to split the studio talk in a few parts that way I can get into details with each specified thing, next time I will talk about the various instruments I use and what’s the difference between them, and later on I will talk about my workflow, what kind of shortcuts I use and how their approached to productions.
I won’t deny that it might (it will) take a while as I’m busy as, but stay tuned or just subscribe to my FEEDS or Newsletter if you don’t wont to bother checking the website every 5 hours.
Till next time bye bye!
D.

I’m far from being an advanced user of Ableton Live, I use it mostly for radio shows and sometimes to stretch stems for remixes, however it seems many people don’t get or underrate the power of a specific Ableton stretching algorithm.

Did you ever listen to some online radio shows and the tracks playing sound like there is an lfo modulating the volume or the phase? Or to be more clear, Did you ever listen to some online radio shows and the tracks played sound like crap?

That’s because of the ableton (or mix meister or what ever) algorithm, by default in Live, this algo is set to “beat” (but in the preferences the default can be setted to any other algorythim) which for full tracks isn’t really appropriate.

The “texture” algorithm doesn’t work either and nor does “tones”, there are 3 other algorithm available “complex” that I personally never liked for full tracks, “complex pro” which works quite well but misses a little something.

What I’m going to suggest to use is the other algorithm Ableton offers “Re-Pitch”, this one despite the other warp modes previously listed, alters the pitch of the track because it acts like the actual pitch from cdjs or turntables.

That’s exactly the point! by using this algorithm we don’t just get rid of that hateful crappy sound, but we also simulate the set being played on turntables/cdj, this gives (in my opinion) a better “in da club” feel.

This thing of course (as all the good things) has its cons, since “Re-Pitch” alters the pitch, most of the time when a track is heavily pitched up or down its key changes so you ll have to re-consider the key you are mixing the other track with, which is a pain in that place.

With a little bit of work though this method gives the closest result to an actual dj-set, worth giving it a try if you never have :)

I get plenty of mails from people asking me which are my favorite plugins, so I cooked up a small list of effects and a small list of my “can’t live without” stuff.
To start with the effects / dynamic plugins  :

1) Renaissance Eq-6 : I have it almost everywhere, I love its color and its very light on cpu, pain that I have to carry my ilok  everywhere but is the price to pay (plus the price of the actual bundle)

2) Renaissance Comp : Another tool from the waves renaissance max that I uber-use , I love its character and and the way you can achieve an awesome sounding compression with just a few tweaks, I use this for almost every main sound in my track, however not a fan of it when it comes to mastering .

3) Sonalksis TBK1 : Simply the fucking best filter out there, 1 big knob and 3 other settings, no additional crap added, and one of the few filters that goes on auto-bypass when fully opened.

4) Logic Dub Delay : Priceless for 2 reasons, it’s awesome, and it comes with logic so you don’t even need to buy it.

5) Cytomic The Glue : WTF how did they fit an SSL inside my mac? Oh no its a plugin…The best comp for buss compression, mastering and whatevercomporession!

6) Flux Epure II : Another ridiculously good sounding EQ, actually, with high chances the best sounding soft eq ever, clean and crisp, I love it for mastering, but for mixing I still prefer R-Eq.

7) TC-Electronic M30 : At TC one day they all took a huge amount of drugs and got drunk at the same time and decided to give this reverb plugin for free, glad they did that cause this thing is amazing!

This was the effects/dynamic top 7 now, for the synth we have …

1) Sylenth1 : So far the best and more versatile virtual instrument ever coded, from basses to leads to pads to alltheother7skiesshit if its not from my Jp or my virus it’s surely from this one.

2) ES2 : Another priceless plugin for the same 2 reasons of the previous mentioned “Dub Dealy”, comes with logic and it sounds so effing GREAT, there are no 7 Skies productions were I didn’t use at least 10 instances of this baby

3) Fxpansion DCAM : in particular Strobe, that has become my default “bass machine”, these synths do not simulate analog sounding, they ARE analog!

4) Massive : I bought this one only a few months ago (even thought I knew it from ages) it has quickly become one of my fav synth, I especially like the matrix concept, the sonic power of this monster is…Massive.

5) EXS-24 : Another Logic default, another plugin that has usually from 25 to 40 instances opened in my projects, simple, light, amazing.

6) MS-20 : Part of the Korg Legacy Collection Analog Edition, I swear to god I can’t tell the difference from the original, and so can’t many others, oh well, you don’t have that annoying constant buzz going on for freaking ever, but is that so bad?

7) Minimonsta : Now, that IS fat !

Soooooo, that’s it, hope you enjoyed this reading and hopefully discovered some new stuff to have fun with.
See you at the next geeky post

David | 7 Skies

I already know I’m going to be hated by more than one person after this article but I somehow need to write it.

I’m more a synth slut than a dynamic processor one so for some people my judgement might sound obvious for someone else might sound stupid and hopefully for some others, will sound interesting (I’m in this category).

Today after a long time I took a small break from productions and sound design, all the remixes and singles I had to finish are done signed and in the hands of the various labels so I’m enjoying a bit of free time doing tests.

I recently put my hands on a new product from a new software house called Cytomic, the product is called “The Glue”, a really nice sounding compressor that has similarities with the well known SSL 4000 G master Buss Compressor.

I’m not lucky (and rich) enough to have the original hardware, but I decided to give a try to another well known and very promoted emulation of this compressor, the Waves SSL Comp.

Downloaded the demo of this last mentioned on my computer I started A/B comparing both emulations and surprisingly I found more difference on the price rather then the quality itself, the waves costs over 800$ the Cytomic 99$.

Here comes part of the trick, I have no shame admitting that more than once I have been victim of the “More expensive = Better” a bit due to my ignorance a bit from reading the forums. I ve always trusted this price rule while I was buying new plugins, only now I m realizing how a cheap product can be twice as good in comparison to an expensive one.

That said, I’d like to put a note and saying that :

its always a matter of taste  and, each plugin sounds different compared to others that emulates the same hardware, but what I’m trying to say here is, can we tell the difference?

back to this 2 plugs, I did some tests with both compressors working on the same audio file with same settings (Actually same compression actions as they have a slightly different threshold setting), the result is a ridiculously similar result.

Not happy I decided to do the phase inver test, for those of you who are not familiar with that, the concept is pretty easy and exactly the same that happens in math when we have -1 + 1 = 0.

So when we have a sound layered with the exact same sound at the exact same position but with inverse phase the result is silence (try it its fun and useful sometimes especially to grab sounds).

Anyway, following the concept written above, I layered a drum loop using the 2 different compressors and inverting the phase of the second layer, I didn’t expect silence, because as I said each plugin is coded differently and they are modeled on hardwares, and each analog hardware has a different type of sound, can be even just slightly different but still unique from others from the same model.

The sound as I expected didn’t go completely silent but is quite close, the main difference is more on the bottom end (low freq)but I was expecting this since “The Glue” has a High Pass filter that allows the user to select at which frequencies the compressor starts to react, the waves compressor doesn’t but as far as I remember in this compressor there is a built-in high pass that doesn’t let the compressor reacting below 50hz (but I repeat I m totally not sure about that).

Well to end the SSL emulation part is that what came to light is : A/B comparing is almost imperceptible, or it is but for a very trained person and still over 70% of these  trained people won’t be able to tell which is which (doing a test on a forum of audio geek right now).

The spectrum analyzer represent a small difference on the mid range (see picture) but apart from that, the spectrum is incredibly similar.

Below I posted a link of the same files I used for the test the way that everyone can do the same test, of course I won’t tell which is which as your brain might trick you and your response would be conditioned.

you can get the files here :

http://7skies.dancenode.com/WavesGlue.zip

And the test is pretty simple, there are 3 files, 2 are drum loop and the other file is a vocal part each file have both compressors “The Glue” by Cytomic and “SSL Comp” by Waves working in the same file so for both the drum files (Slap.wav & StereoBus.wav)we have : 8 beats with the loop compressed by compressor 1 that drops instantly in compressor 2 for other 8 beats, so back again to compressor 1 for 8 beats and again 8 beats of compressor 2, after this session of loop there is a few sec silence and then the phase invert test where you can hear the actual difference between the compressor.

For the vocal file we have : the clean voice with no compression, when the voice restarts we have compressor 1 active, when it starts again compressor 2 active, and the last part is once again the phase inversion test.

So to close this long post what I’m trying to say is, do not judge plugins from their price or their brand, no one said that great coders only work for the best companies, sometimes they do but at the same time they find a little spare time to work on their own products and sometimes these products are as good or even better than the “professional standard” plugins.

That said, I hope the meaning of this post won’t be misunderstood, I love and I (legally) own various waves products I think they have been making great stuff for years, but I also think that if the price of the plugins would be proportioned at its value and not at its brand, people would enjoy buying original softwares a bit more than getting the pirate version.

David | 7 Skies