wire to the ear

I am about to jump on a nine hour flight. I have an important remix due in about ten days. I have not even opened the files to hear the song or the parts I was given to work with. Given these facts I plan on making the most of tomorrow’s flight and see how much remixing I can do in coach!

I used this challenge as an excuse to go on a little shopping spree. I bought some M-Audio IE-30 in ear headphones and an extra Macbook Pro battery. I guess I should do an official review of the IE-30s when I get back. They certainly feel a lot nicer than the Apple earbuds I have been using.

With laptops we have full recording studios where ever we go. But do we ever really making music in the park or on a flight? I will tell you my answer soon!

photo credit: caribb

Covenant is one of the best known electronic bands from Sweden. Since the early 1990s they have sold a huge amount albums. I recently caught up with the lead singer Eskil in Berlin and asked him a few questions about songwriting, studio techniques, fashion and gear.

When you write a song do you work on the lyrics or music first?

Neither! We usually start with a sound, noise or the idea of a song. Then the melodies pop up as I start working on it while Joakim is starting up his lyrics engine.

Do you have any preferences when it come to a microphone and mic-pre for your voice?

Yes. When we did “Northern light” with long-time Rammstein producer Jacob Hellner we tried a bunch of different microphones and pre-amps, Neumann and stuff, but what we finally picked was a copy by Soundelux Inc of an all time classic: Telefunken Ela-M 251. The Universal Audio 6175 is a good companion and pre-amp.

Is there any software, plug-ins or special effects you particularly like on your voice?

I used to love to put a subtle chorus from an old Roland unit but these days I try more to get the sound directly from my vocals and the mic rather than tweaking it.

How about sequencing? Ableton Live? Pro-tools? Or something else?

Yeah, we’re Steinberg users since Atari 1040ST. Before that we had a sequencer and before that we played everything manually, even live! So we have earned our sequencer so to speak. We were 5 guys and having fun.

I know you own a Moog Voyager. What other key hardware pieces do you use and enjoy?

Hm, I like my microphone, but the Waldorfs (Q, XT & Pulse) still sound like friends I like to know. And Joakim likes to surround himself with red synthesizers from that Swedish company. I love the computer.

What is the secret to writing a great song?

There is no secret, just listen to yourself. Some basic knowledge of structure helps but actually I sometimes feel the music is just passing through me and its up to me to use my craftsmanship to make the best of it. Maybe as a musician you are more of a talented receiver picking up signals than the creator of them. But I also devour popular culture output, maybe that helps.

You are always dressed quite well! Do you have a favorite fashion designer?

I like shoes, with decent shoes you could even wear jeans (I dont have any) but no shorts please. And I like hats. Church’s and Borsalino, way to go.

What is some music your are currently listening to?

Field recordings and drones without rhythm or melodies. This is a gem caught in the web: www.touchradio.org.uk

What are 3 great websites you check often?

BBC, wiki, industrial.org and whc.unesco.org as a bonus site.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

We just completed one of the greatest DVDs known to the industrialized mankind. Do us a favor and check it up: In Transit by Covenant. See you around, take care and control. Eskil: www.covenant.se

One of the greatest things about working in modern DAWs is the ability to stretch or shrink audio with ease. Warp markers and the variables that go along with them are incredibly useful tools which should be looked at carefully. Here is an example how I used these features to perfect the timing of an analog synth I recorded.

Sometimes to make my first vocal in a song stand out I make an intro that pulls the ear away from center. Then when the first verse begins I bring the notes and sounds into a center space. I know this sounds a little abstract so listen to the audio sample below to know exactly what I mean:

The bright bell like synthesizer melody that plays before the vocals begin is my Electrocomp-101. What you don’t realize is that the last note before the vocal begins is actually only half as long. I used Ableton Live’s Warp Markers to stretch the that last note. This is something wonderfully easy to do. Inside the Clip View click the Warp button on. Once it’s lit yellow you can now double click on various places over the wave form to create Warp Makers. All you have to do now is drag the markers around to change the length of the individual areas. Use you ears to get the timing you like.

But most people stop there and that’s not using the full potential of this feature set. You can improve and tailor the sound of the Warping engine on a given clip by adjusting the Warp Mode. The following audio sample is the Electrocomp-101 melody Warped to fit my song but with the default Warp Mode “Beats” selected:

Do you hear that last note? Not smooth or natural sounding is it? Ableton can do better. To get there I clicked the Warp Mode drop down menu and selected Texture Mode. I also now experimented with the Grain Size and Flux setting until the last note sounded like it came from the Electrocomp directly at that length. Keep in mind that the last note was really only half as long. Take a listen now:

Most other sequencers now offer similar features. Of course you can get wild and mangle your audio on purpose. The next time you wish you held a note longer or screamed “GO!” for just a few more seconds select a Warp Marker!

I have a large collection of mini tricks I use when producing music. When looking for a way to create some variation in arrangements most of the time I consider things like changing notes, drum patterns or adding effects in and out at certain parts. I also like to play with the speed of a individual clips. This technique can add tension to a chorus or showcase a serious lyric.

Ableton Live has a nice feature that allows you to half or double a Clips tempo. As with most things in Live this is really easy to do. This will work on either Midi or audio Clips. You have to have Warp on for the feature to work on an audio Clip. First, double click on a Clip to open it in the Clip View which runs along the bottom area of Ableton Live. Next, find the :2 and *2 buttons. These are found under the Clip’s tempo number. To make a clip play at half speed click :2 and for double speed hit *2. Of course you can keep clicking either button to take things into extremes. Lastly, you will want to adjust the Clip’s loop markers to only encompass the new note length.

While this is a ridiculously obvious feature of Live, I do think it worth a blog post to get it into one’s radar. We all get used to working in a certain way and our eyes pass over the unfamiliar. I use this technique in a song off my album Attack Decay called You Are Disturbing. Listen to the following audio sample. There is a clear repeating main melody. After I say “Tell me the things you like to do sexually.” which is 50 seconds in on the audio clip, the same exact melody plays back at 2x the tempo. I used a different synth, a TC Powercore01 for the double speed clip. I think it makes a nice statement:

Do you ever mess around with tempos within your own songs?

Liptikl which is pronounced “lip tickle” is a new application from a company called Intermorphic. It’s basic function is to help you create lyrics. When you launch the program the main window is separated by three sections: ideas, lyrics and verses.

To start of you need to put some text snippets into the ideas section. You can use your mind and just chuck in some words or head online and grab text from Wikipedia entries, poems, song lyrics, news articles, basically anything.

After you have the text ideas in their containers you click the “Create Lyrics” button and liptikl will spit out a verse. The processing does seem a bit random but you can keep clicking the “Create Lyrics” button repeatedly to get new verses. According to the user guide liptikl is applying internal rules:

There are many internal rules used to create lyrics within liptikl. When the liptikl lyric engine is figuring-out what to do, it combines all these rules together in combination with your source material, and respects them as best it can, but ultimately liptikl makes its own choice as to exactly what to do. In other words, you can give the engine brain lots of guidance, but ultimately (like a child) you let liptikl makes the final, detailed decisions as to what to do.

The reason this all works, is that at its heart, the liptikl lyric engine uses random events in combination with a powerful set of rules. How you interpret what you read is filtered through your own internal knowledge of language. This combination of chance and logic is what allows liptikl to keep coming-up with ideas that are fresh, interesting and unpredictable.

You can apply Lyric Rules which tell liptikl how to create your verse. For example “4 5 4 5″ tells liptikl to use four words per line, the first and third and second and fourth lines ryhme, four lines total.

When you get a verse your happy with head into the last section and click “Add” which then saves your verse in that last section. Repeating that process you eventually build up a song.

I’ve been using the 30 day demo and I am undecided if liptikl is worth $99. They do offer a version for $59 but you can not use liptikl’s output in a commercial project. I would recommend that most people should buy Masterwriter first (screenshot on right). As a song writing tool its a far more comprehensive product. But liptikl is different enough to justify owning both if you have the cash and are a full time musician (is that possible?).

For those of you who have zero dollars to spend there are some free and fun online lyrics generators. For example the always dark “Random Goth Lyric Generator” or even more scary “Alanis Morissette Lyric Generator“.

One thing to keep in mind when using liptikl is if you source your original text from a news clipping, poem, other band’s lyrics, make sure the output is far different enough so that your not plagiarizing or stealing someone’s copyrighted ideas.

This is a 20 minute Screencast showing Cognitone Software’s Harmony Navigator. You will get to see different “palettes” and accompaniments producing wonderful music. We show you how to create a verse and chorus and then export the midi into Ableton Live. Once inside Ableton Live you will see how to set up your imported data in a meaningful way. The video is nicely sized so be sure to click the TV icon under the player to view the show in full screen mode.

You can also read an interview with Andre Schnoor the developer of Harmony Navigator here: Interview with Andre Schnoor of Cognitone Software.

Be sure to check out Harmony Navigator at www.cognitone.com and Ableton Live at www.ableton.com.

Direct download links:
Download MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)
Download Flash Video (.flv)

Cognitone is a music technology software company based in Hamburg, Germany. I have come to love their first product Harmony Navigator. With Cognitone’s second release Music Prototyping System to be released in 2008 I thought it would be a good time to interview the founder and developer Andre Schnoor. Be sure to also check out the special wire to the ear screencast showing how to create a verse and chorus in Harmony Navigator and then bring it into Ableton Live.

Tell us about Cognitone and it’s employees. Tell us what your job is there?

Cognitone is my baby and my job is to teach it walking. I founded the company a while ago already, but spent the past years in the office developing the technology. Cognitone actually started just now after a longer period of under-the-radar operation. As of today, it’s still mainly me and supporting friends and family. I’m talking about “us” for two reasons: The people who invested time and money to help making Cognitone possible deserve some respect and I consider them part of the project. On the other hand, it’s also a promise. This is not the first company I started and startups tend to grow quickly. It is impossible to be successful in the long term without build a team. That said, I hope we will soon be able to offer interesting and challenging jobs to talented people.

Harmony Navigator is based around some advance music theories. Do you have classical music training?

I’ve always looked at theory only from the perspective of a creative person. If some scientific concept looked promising with respect to /making/ music, I swallowed it within days. For more than twenty years, I gathered my current knowledge by following this path. Classical music education however, seemed rather static and repetitive to me. I didn’t feel the desire to study music at an university. Although I have a master degree in computer science. Interestingly enough, most scientific approches in musicology originate from the background of the cognitive sciences (which are my specialty: artificial intelligence, perceptional psychology, neuroscience), rather than classical music theory.

Would you consider a version of Harmony Navigator as a VST or Audio-Units plug-in?

Yes, this is definitely on the agenda. Plug-ins however, can’t offer the comprehensiveness and comfort of a desktop application. The main challenge here is to get rid of the menu bar and all those in-depth “workstation” features of the program and shrink it to suit the plug-in philosophy. Hence, the Harmony Navigator plug-in will be more lean and compact than the current program.

Seems like a lot pro-audio software company come from Germany. Steinberg, Ableton, Native Instruments, Emagic, Celemony, Vielklang, for example. Do you think there is any reason for this? Do you have any relationships with any of these companies or people that work at them?

Well, this must be German Wahnsinn. I think a vital part of the German mentality, especially with engineers, is an incredible endurance and perfectionism. Music software is complex enough to require this. Us krauts probably love to sacrifice ourselves for the beauty of a technology. Me for instance. It took me many, many years of research and development to get a working model for the music prototyping technology. In the eyes of a reasonable businessman, this is economical suicide. Anyway, now it’s there and it lives.

The local software scene is truly open minded and friendly. Just like a family. Many of us know each other. An unsuspecting person will likely not notice any sense of competition at the surface, although (or perhaps because) the market for music software is tight and tough. Especially after broadband Internet promoted software piracy to a threatening extent.

Harmony Navigator has some similar features of PG Music’s Band in a Box. Have you looked at or used Band Read “Interview with Andre Schnoor of Cognitone Software.”