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Berlin is the undisputed center of electronic music. A few times a month friends and blog readers come to visit. I’ve decided to make a Google Map with the locations of many of the great record stores, labels, synthesizer manufacturers, audio software companies and nightclubs you can check out upon arrival.

Ableton, Tresor, Hard Wax, Native Intruments, Schneider’s Buero, Neumann, MFB, Gigolo Records, Berghain, JoMoX, Sugar Bytes, BPitch Control, SoundCloud… what more do you want?

If you do come to visit don’t forget you will be in a gorgeous city full of historic places and green parks. Don’t spend all your time dancing. See it all!

Remember Google Maps is feature rich. You can get point to point directions, zoom way in, see satellite views and create your own map of places in Berlin you want to see (click a pin and select “save to my map”).

To view the map full screen and also see the complete list of great places: click here

I performed live Saturday night in Malta (photo above). It’s a great island below Italy and above Lybia. It’s in the EU, has ancient Roman ruins and amazing blue water. I’ve been performing there about once a year for the past five years and it’s a real treat. These are the kind of gigs everyone dreams about. Our hotel had a large terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. The hotel also had four swimming pools! Ok back to the music…

The most interesting aspect of the trip music tech wise was at sound check. Scottish techno producer Neil Landstrumm (photo below) was also performing and he brought some nice toys. Besides his Mac laptop with Ableton he had an Elektron Machinedrum and Korg ESX1 Electribe SX. My interest really peaked when he pulled out a FMR Audio Really Nice Compressor and Boss RE 20 Space Echo. Needless to say Neil’s sound was very punchy and he had the crowd going. We are old pals (he used to live in NYC) and he went on about how much he liked both the RNC and RE 20.

I ran into some problems at sound check. After making the club check all their equipment for about an hour Neil pointed out the issue was my fault. It turns out my mic was on and even though none of the Ableton channels had the input on the mic was so loud distorting it was bleeding through causing some nasty zapping sounds. I graciously apologized to everyone and luckily redeemed myself later in the night by managing to crowd surf without looking like an idiot.

What? Crowd surf? Unfortunately yes. I like to be really connected to the audience so usually I jump down off the stage however remaining on my feet and walk through people singing. This time it was so packed when I hit the floor without me being able to stop them the kids picked me up! By some magic grace of god I didn’t look too stupid and they floated me back to the stage in one piece. In fact no one even messed up my hair… whew!

I played two songs which are totally new; stuff for my next album. Both worked however I need to make “Lightning Strikes” less synth full for a club setting. “I Stand with You” made me very happy. Only by playing your songs in a live situation can you be ever sure if they are great or not. That’s the tip of the day.

The next show is Stuttgart. To see the flyer: click here

Ableton just posted this interview with Paul Kalkbrenner the DJ and main actor in the soon to be released movie Berlin Calling.

“How many music software products can claim to be filmstars? As far as we know, only one: Ableton Live. A new film, “Berlin Calling”, not only features some outrageously prominent onscreen footage but also stars renowned DJ and long-time Live user Paul Kalkbrenner in the leading role. A big thank you to Paul and the film’s director, Hannes Stöhr, for giving us such wonderful publicity.

The plot goes something like this: Berlin electronic music composer Martin (Paul Kalkbrenner), known as DJ Ickarus, is touring with his manager and girlfriend Mathilde (Rita Lengyel) from club to club around the globe and is about to release his biggest album to date. All of his plans are thrown out of kilter, however, after Ickarus is submitted to a psychiatric clinic high on drugs after a gig.

Go and see the film to discover what happens next (hint: witness the therapeutic powers of Ableton Live!) “Berlin Calling” opens in Germany on October 2 and is expected to be released internationally soon afterwards.”

This is pretty stange and makes me a nervous for some reason. Maybe it just hits too close to home! I am happy to see Ableton get as much press as possible because every musician should be using their software. Let’s hope this movie doesn’t get the same reviews as every other electronic music film has.

For more info: www.berlin-calling.de

What’s my secret to making music? I let my Gummi Bear friends do it for me! Normally they are camera shy but today they let me take photos of them recording a song. There are 10 photos and captions in total so be sure to click “Continue…” to see them all!

Red and his twin brother (also named Red) team up to add more noise into the signal chain of an Electrocomp-101 vintage analog synthesizer.

Green helps Orange change the Control Mode to Envelope 1 on an Electrocomp-101 synthesizer.

Green and Red need some inspiration before they go back to making music so they lie down for a bit on a Roland SH3 synthesizer keyboard and stare at the studio’s acoustic cloud.

Yellow and Red team up and jam on a Vermona DRM1 MKIII drum machine. Yellow changes the resonance on the snare while Red messes with the highpass filter on the lazer zap.

Read “Gummi Bears Make Music.”

Vocal manipulation with Ableton Simplers. from wiretotheear on Vimeo.

There are thousands of ways to mangle audio in weird and wild sound. Here’s a screencast of a trick I sometimes put to work. Here is the end result (4 samples are loaded in this player):

Here is the original sample I used:

The technique uses multiple Ableton Simplers in a Device Group. If your an Ableton wizard you will know this stuff  but if your not a regular user of Simpler and Macros you will learn something.

Sample credit: Incarnadine

I’m happiest when creating songs for fun. Music that doesn’t have to fit anyone’s expectations. Constantly those recordings are my best. Remixes fall in the “oh man why am I doing this” category. I really pull my hair out trying to bend someone else’s vision into my own. For the most part if a song is great to start with it won’t need a remix. Sure there are super rock or melodic songs that need to be made into club hits but most of the remixes I get offered are already electronic.

Today I’m remixing a guy named Satronica. He’s one of my good friends from New York. He’s working on an album for Lenny Dee’s Industrial Strength Records. The song titled “Revenge Plan” is vocal heavy. The way he sings is pretty weird, almost an Arab chant style. I’m still trying to figure out how to mash the vocals into a tight grid. I may end up cutting each word up and throwing it into Reason’s NN-XT.

Because the vocals are so strong I don’t feel the need to keep his original music so I fired up some new toys and here’s a clip of what’s on the machine today.Keep in mind it’s just the synths and basic beat at this point. Purely amateur time so far:

The kick is Jomox Mbase 01, the main synth is the Voice of Saturn being sidechained with the key using Ableton’s compressor, later I add in another two copies of the Voice of Saturn channel but detuned left and right. The lazer zap’s are from an Audiorealism ABL. The drum roll is D16’s Drumazon and Devastor also sidechained with the Mbase 01. The snare is loaded into Native Instrument’s Battery 3 and if from a freebee disc I got with Computer Music magazine a few years ago.

It’s not nearly where it will end up but I thought you’d like to check in on the process. Writing this post gave my ears a few minutes break.

Ableton Live 7. This is my favorite piece of software. Live’s innovative Session View mode gives musicians the freedom to try multiple musical ideas before entering the arrangement process. This fact gives Ableton Live a huge edge over it’s competitors. Each year Ableton has upgraded Live adding in features of legacy sequencers and also eclipsing them with new stuff. Some of the big items in the “7″ upgrade include an Enhanced Audio Engine, new Compressor, Sidechaining, Time Signature changes, Rex file support, and an Innovative drum rack. link

Moog Little Phatty. It’s all about the sound! Buy someone you love a Moog and they will be looking at it 20 years from now fondly thinking of you. All Moog’s are classics and the Little Phatty is pure Moog. Beautifully engineered nothing sounds as raw, bassy and loud. It sounds like a teenager behind the wheel of a Lambourgini. Manufactured in the good ole USA. link

Cognitone Harmony Navigator. The fantastic and large world of chords and scales can be illusive for those with no formal music instruction. During the music making process many musicians search for the right notes for the perfect chorus or bridge. Harmony Navigator is many colorful graphic playgrounds of chord sets. You jump around them in real time, clicking your mouse playing chords. The chords are grouped by colors and distance. As you do your clicks your creative juices explode. Each time I load the program a new song idea pops in my head. link

Yamaha Tenori-On. This is a beautiful new electronic musical instrument designed by media artist Toshio Iwai. You hold it with two hands and are represented with a grid of 256 white LEDs. It has a unique sequencer which allows for traditional step style movements but also pings and gravity motions. The LEDs bounce and fly across the grid. You can add layers sounds. You end up with a gorgeous light show viewable from the front and backside of the instrument. If the musician you love had a Light Bright when he was a child he’s going to freak when he see this. Inspirational and new the Tenori-On. link

Apple Macbook Pro. The early 2000’s saw the music studio make it’s final journey from a room full of hardware into a single computer running virtual software. It is now possible to run practically as many effects and synthesizers as you need to make a nice song all ITB (inside the box). Another paradigm shift is that laptops are now so fast there is no Read “Top 10 gifts for musicians holiday 2007.”

Let’s face it, every good song you write should have a music video. Every PC comes with easy to use free video editing software. The MP3 players and phones we use to listen to music on all play videos. YouTube and dozens of other popular websites are ready to help you spread your video all over the net. Why miss such out on such a great promotion tool? As I mentioned in another post every musician also has to be a performing musician. Since you have all these videos why not play them behind you when you perform live? I’ve been doing exactly that for years. Here’s a video of me performing in Stuttgart: The Horrorist Live, Stuttgart See my LCD projector shooting my record label’s logo behind me?

I just bought a new Macbook Pro and I decided to completely redo the video I project during my shows. Ableton Live allows me to use any Quicktime .mov file. Simple right? Well no because within the Quicktime format there are dozens of Codecs and options you can choose when rendering your video file.

Codec stands for Coder Decoder and in this subject it’s refering to Coding and Recoding compression. Why do we want compression on our video file? If you were to export your video from your editing system (Final Cut Pro) without any compression the file size would be huge. Wikipedia says about one Gigabyte every four minutes. Besides taking up hard drive space large video files Read “The best codec for video in Ableton Live on a Mac.”

Here’s a video of what I am working on in the studio today. This time I have not written the lyrics in advance so I have it saved as the generic name “new_neu”. I created a vintage analog TR-808 drum kit by dragging the song “Is There an Exit?” by Absolute Body Control into the arrangement view in Ableton Live. I then isolated drum sounds and dragged them into empty slots of the Impulse drum plug-in. I erased the original song, hit tab to enter session view and created some new drum patterns. I don’t always lift Read “The verse chorus succession in Ableton Live.”