Archive for January, 2010
Ableton themes
Jan 22nd
One of the small but persistent issues I’ve had with Ableton is the default theme. It’s not bad for daytime and studio use, but it’s completely wrong for DJing. When you’re in a dark environment like a club, you don’t want your computer screen to be brightly lit up, as this makes it harder for your eyes to adjust when you’ve been looking at something else, and encourages you to spend lots of time staring at the screen, rather than interacting with your audience. It also casts an eery glow on your face, which is never sexy.
To avoid this, people working in dark environments tend to invert the default colour scheme on their computer. Instead of having dark text on a pale background, they have pale text on a dark background. This means far fewer pixels are lit up, so there is less overall light and the text stands out more. This is easier on the eyes (and frankly looks cooler).
Sadly, Ableton does not ship with any useable dark themes. There are some extras, but they’re basically just minor colour changes: and haven’t been designed for DJing use. It’s important that the key features are picked out in strong colours, so you can see what’s happening at a glance.
Thankfully, someone has written an Ableton Theme Editor, which lets you create custom themes for Ableton. You can also download other people’s themes: there are some good ones at http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=134087&p=1060306&hilit=themes#p1060306.
There is one minor limitation in Ableton’s theme engine, sadly. The default palette of colours for clips is quite bright: which works fine when the clip names are black – but is hard to read when they’re white. There are a few colours you can use that are readable, but it would be nice if Ableton added some darker clip colours for people with white-on-black themes.
The current theme I use for DJing looks like this:
DJ Effects Using Phase Cancellation
Jan 19th
I threw together a quick video over the weekend, explaining an audio processing technique I use to split audio into “high” and “low” frequency bands, and apply effects separately to each band. The cool part about this (as opposed to using high and lowpass filters) is that it’s a lossless separation: so it doesn’t change the audio stream in any way (until you apply effects, of course).
I’ve found this technique incredibly helpful when building DJing effects, as it allows me to utterly mutilate/phase/beat-repeat/flange the high frequencies of a track, without affecting the bass and kick in any way. One of the limitations of classic effects is that they apply to the entire audio stream, so they can make the kick messy or otherwise cause the energy of the track to drop. Isolating the bass and leaving it untouched avoids this problem entirely.
The other cool aspect of this technique is that I can sweep DJ effects over a frequency band. I’m quite fond of starting a flanger running on the very highest frequencies of my audio stream, and slowly sweeping the high/low cutoff down, until the flanger is affecting everything except the kick. This produces a sound not unlike a classic filter sweep (Xone92 or DJM-800 style), but without changing the overall frequency footprint of the track, lowering the volume or otherwise causing grief.
Lastly, it lets you do weird glitch effects that de-sync the audio streams. The simplest way of doing this is to apply a beat-repeat to the high channel, so the melody stutters while the bassline keeps going.
The video below explains the theory behind this technique, and shows how to set it up inside Ableton in about 30 seconds. Please don’t shoot me because my signal theory is grossly oversimplified.
You can download the Ableton Rack shown in this video from http://marshall-law.co.nz/audio/boywonder/Splitter.adg.zip.
If you want to see some example DJ effects built on top of this rack, take a look on the Master channel of the latest version of my DJing Template..
http://www.vimeo.com/8805159
