Acquire the “Empathy” Pack this month with Music Production Club membership!

Just dropping the word that if you join my pal Brian Funk’s Music Production Club during February 2024 (for a measly $6 a month subscription fee), you will get the Empathy pack by PerforModule (normally ~$30) as a bonus! Empathy was my attempt at making go-to effect racks for the tonal and dynamic aspects of mixing that just work to make everything sound better.

Empathy includes a few *very select* effect racks. It’s definitely about quality over quantity here.

Ultimatum is a ten-series dynamic sculptor that applies a delicious tone-shaping compression. Pushing drums hard into it creates a very unique smashed sound.

The One’ provides tasty low and high cut filters with the perfect amount of resonance bump built-in, a delectable “more-than-EQ” tone highlight, and a go-to notch filter for the occasion when needing to remove blistering resonances.

The Auditory Miximizer gives you low and high shelf boosts that are calibrated to focus on everything but the least aesthetic midrange zones. It can be dynamic, too.

Dilation Warder: is the go-to gate/expander that is dumb easy to dial in. You can use it to do both. Gate things (so the quietest stuff gets dipped out). Expand things (so the peaks poke up even more). It’s good. I use it all the time in all sorts of projects.


The MPC also comes with a ton of other groovy stuff and nifty perks like hanging out at monthly Discord meetings with us and trying to make music in less than an hour based on prompts.

If you’re a cheap frugal bastard (as I tend to be), you can just grab the stuff, cut and run. Keep everything. No one will begrudge you. The world understands what it’s like to be a struggling visionary. Six bucks to salvation. Or something like that. We should all have more empathy for our fellow humans. Peace out!

PerforModule x pATCHES: “Shapes”.

Shapes is an installable Ableton Live pack built around the idea of custom-shaped modulations.

It consists of an assortment of Shaper presets for applying interesting modulations to any control (by yours truly), and intricate Instruments and Audio Effects built utilizing them (by pATCHES).

You can dive in right away and start making music using the categorized Instrument and Effect Racks, and use the others to further experimentally modulate whatever you want, here and there.

CONTENTS:
•22 Audio Effect Racks
19 Instrument Racks
25 Silhouette Shapes
36 Pulse Shapes
12 Rise Shapes
11 Sawblade Shapes

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Silhouettes are shaped after things, and stuff! They are fun and silly.

Adjust parameters to modify the modulators! For example: a touch of slightly-smoothed jitter adds randomized unpredictable “weathering” to each of the Moai statues.

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Pulses are logical, based on timing intervals. They give access to weird timings that fit within a selectable time span (like 3/13ths of measure) to use for polyphonic and other types of rhythmic interweavings.

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Rises can be used for arrangement and sound design, providing various styles of dynamic ramping of your mapped parameters of choice from one extreme to another. Great for temporary use during build transition breakdowns.

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The standard sawblade LFO shape has been bored to sawdust, but Sawblades adds some new sawblade shapes, based on… saw… blades. Yeah.

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The Effect Racks shift rhythmically, palpitating in wonderfully weird ways.
Organized into categories: Distortion, Hall, Modulated Delay, Room, and Special.

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The Instrument Racks are infused with nested modulators implementing nuanced organic motion.
Organized into categories: Ambient & Evolving, Bass, Cinematic, Piano & Keys, and Synth Rhythmic.

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Here’s a video about Shapes courtesy of Brian Funk:

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And here’s a piece I made using some of the Shapes Instrument and Effect Racks:

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The Shapes pack for Ableton Live Suite is available at Isotonik Studios at an introductory sale price of $22.

Want to get Shapes for free? Ableton is conducting a giveaway of Shapes on facebook to five fortuitous victors!
I’m certainly feeling the love from all the comments on there so far!

8/08 Freebie: The Tuned 808 Kicker

Inspired by the on-the-spot pieces crafted by participants of today’s Music Production Club meeting (I was late and didn’t make a piece, but listened to the others and they were awesome), I spontaneously decided to share an upgraded version of the Tuned Sub Kicker from the free Sweetie Pies pack which has been lurking in my library, unreleased publicly, for quite some time — until now — at 8:08:08pm on 8/08 (my time).

Well, here you go!


>>>Download Tuned 808 Kicker for Live 10+<<<

It’s like the Tuned Sub Kicker, but more growly!

Dial it in to add incisive, tuned sub thump to any drum loop. It’s sick! And dope!

It has Bzork knob. What else is there to say?

Enjoy! 😊



Tempo Dynamics

When applying dynamic effects, we are rarely going to need the entire timing ranges available, depending on the tempo, right? The new Tempo Dynamics pack provides go-to racks with minimum and maximum values hard-wired to ranges most potentially useful, given the chosen tempo — avoiding values that are likely too fast or too slow to be helpful.

Want to limit, squish, groovify, level, expand, or gate something? Reach for one of these racks in the nearest available tempo, and with handy knobs available to fine-tune, then dial it in quickly without worrying about the numbers or graphs… all while retaining the human element of your personal touch still in place. The macro knobs are also useful for automating in an arrangement, say to let something breathe more during one section and then clamp down during another.

I started devising these effect racks back when Live was still on version 9, so I’ve been testing them quite a lot over the last few years. They can be quite handy!


PACK CONTENTS

• 23 Tempo Compressors ranging from 20 to 240 bpm in 10bpm increments.
• 15 Tempo Expanders ranging from 25 to 235 bpm in 15bpm increments.
• 8 Tempo Gates ranging from 30 to 240 bpm in 30bpm increments.
• 12 Tempo Gluers ranging from 20 to 240 bpm in 20bpm increments.
• 23 Tempo Limiters ranging from 20 to 240 bpm in 10bpm increments.
• Bonus for Live 11: 23 Tempo Multibanders ranging from 20 to 240 bpm in 10bpm increments.

The Tempo Dynamics pack costs a paltry $12.
Grab it here from Isotonik Studios.


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Free Loudness Meter VSTs

“WTF are Loudness Units?” you may ask. Well, they are simply a measure of loudness, just like decibels.
One LU actually is equivalent to one dB. However, an important difference is that Loudness Units are “shaped” according to the human ear’s proclivity to hear certain frequencies more easily than others. Effectively, LUs tend to feel more consistent to our brains than dB will when measuring varying frequency content, and therefore LU meters are preferable to use (compared to, say, RMS meters) for assessing the overall loudness of music.

Below are shown six free LU (aka Loudness Unit) meters, listing features of each. The most important value when matching the loudness of songs is IL (Integrated Loudness), which is the average loudness over the entire course of given time (with very quiet material gated out).

These devices are available as VST effect plugins for any capable VST host (such as Ableton Live, for example).

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Live 11 Updates for PerforModule Packs.

[Almost] all of the PerforModule sale packs (and some of the freebie packs) have been updated for Ableton Live 11 (finally)!

Primarily, this means that racks which had less than eight mapped macros (resulting in some blank controls) have been tidied up to make use of Live 11’s ability to customize the number of macros shown.

Occasional effect racks have also had some macro variations (aka presets) added to them.

Live 11 versions of MasterBuss Cassette Tape and MasterBuss Vinyl Record from the Bussification pack.

The following PerforModule packs have all been updated for Live 11. If you own any of the sale packs, you can download the updated versions from your account at Isotonik Studios, either now or at any later date when you acquire Live 11.

Everyone is welcome to grab the free packs!

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FREE PACKS UPDATED FOR LIVE 11
Emphasizers
ParallAux
Sweetie Pies
Turboencabulation
Utilification

SALE PACKS UPDATED FOR LIVE 11
Advanced Splytterz
Amplitude Operands
Bussification
Dephaultz
Drum Enhancerz
DynaMixing Ultimate
Empathy
Guitaritis
Harmonicality
Note Range Setters
One Knob Wonders
PMX FX
Testful Mastering
Uno Plus

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New Free Pack for Live 11: “𝓢𝓾𝓹𝓮𝓻 𝓐𝔀𝓮𝓼𝓸𝓶𝓮 𝓕𝓧”

This pack includes the bespoke Effect Racks from the 𝓢𝓾𝓹𝓮𝓻 𝓐𝔀𝓮𝓼𝓸𝓶𝓮 𝓢𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓭𝓼 retro keyboard instrument pack for Ableton Live i released in collaboration with Brian Funk (but not the instruments), updated for Live 11.

As usual, care is taken to map parameter values cleverly and gainstage things sensibly so that these racks are highly usable in many situations. I also tried to come up with unique signal processing chains leading to interesting results, like 𝓓𝓻𝓾𝓷𝓴 𝓕𝓻𝓲𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓼 sounding like your inebriated companions trying to sing along with you very badly — or like 𝓣𝓱𝓻𝓪𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓻 giving a one-knob guitar distortion that scales from subtle overdrive to brutal metal fuzz — or like 𝓡𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓔𝓪𝓻𝓼  emulating… your ears ringing (perhaps to be used for film sound design) — or like 𝓢𝓱𝓮𝓹𝓫𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓡𝓲𝓼𝓮𝓻 performing the auditory illusion of constantly increasing pitch.

(example device info)

Remember that you can hover your mouse over device headers and macro controls to learn about what they do.
Don’t fly blind! Or say screw it and go crazy with the random button. I’m not your parental unit.

^click to grab 𝓢𝓾𝓹𝓮𝓻 𝓐𝔀𝓮𝓼𝓸𝓶𝓮 𝓕𝓧 for free^
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Ten More Youtube Channels Worth Subscribing To

Aaron Holstein

I met Aaron Holstein (aka VibeSquaD aka Backpact aka the bassist/keyboardist from Zilla) at the 2007 Sonic Bloom festival in Colorado, where my wife Lore and i were supplying coffee and tea backstage for the artists. I remember chatting with them after their awesome set with Sporque (one of my favorite live acts to dance to ever which also had Ooah from the Glitch Mob on beats and Jamie Janover on percussion), wherein i mentioned noticing that a certain bass synth note they kept hitting happened to resonate with the stage, causing this extra delicious rattle. “It was a C sharp!” Aaron told me later backstage. I’ll always remember that.

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Free M30 Reverb IRs

THE LEGACY of the M30

Here’s a bunch of Reverb IRs for you, sampled from the unobtainable TC M30 Plugin.
I believe that plugin was one of the very first VSTs i ever grabbed after i started getting into Ableton Live. I remember it being some sort of time-limited temporary free offer. After years of not thinking about it, i recently realized i still had a working 32-bit copy of the plugin, and so took some IR snapshots of it, because why not.


>>> DOWNLOAD M30 IRs <<<

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DankVerb

Hi. Reporting that the new pack of Reverb Impulse Responses for any DAW, DankVerb, is now available.

It includes 150 dank, lush, and dystopian Impulse Responses suitable for post-apocalyptic sound design, recorded at 192kHz. They were crafted by carefully combining multiple reverbs together, mad scientist style.

Place elements in mysterious and foreboding physical spaces suitable for fantasy, science fiction, or horror settings.

DankVerb is a perfect companion to Ableton Live 11’s new Hybrid Reverb device. Drop in DankVerb IRs to augment Hybrid Reverb’s built-in algorithmic section. If you’re still on Live 9 or 10, on the other hand, they work great with the Max for Live Convolution Reverb device. Don’t even use Ableton Live? Need a Convolution Engine plugin? No problem. This article by Bedroom Producers Blog has got you covered with some sweet free options.

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DankVerb

Bolster your library with the full collection of one hundred and fifty fresh and steaming IRs!

More details can be had by perusing the PDF user manual, which you can view in browser or download if you like.

Acquire the full version of DankVerb at Isotonik Studios:
DANKVERB.

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That’s all for today. Don’t be jerks to each other, ok?