So i noticed a slight mistake in that one of the Secret Technology EQ‘s bands was enabled slighlty off of zero by default. Why!!?? (There’s always gotta be only little thing that sneaks through.) Well anyways, i fixed it, and have updated the Finalization mastering effects template pack. Since i don’t have lemonsqueezy set up to be able to send emails to customers yet, i’m hereby posting the update announcement here.
Please check your lemonsqueezy “my orders” page and re-download Finalization! I’ve placed the Ableton pack in there directly, so if you already got the documentation, just grab the .alp.
To install it, just drag it into Ableton Live and click the confirm message. Woohoo!
Hi, i’m happy to report that the 𝓑𝓾𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓯𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 pack update for Live 12.3 has dropped!
Brian Funk tries out the bussification effects on a mix.
This is the first of planned updates to every PerforModule pack in order to implement the latest Live 12 features. Continue reading to see the User Manual, the Changelog, and D&D-style Effect Rack Statblocks.
BassTame from the KVR Developer Challenge 2023 is purported to be a bass compressor, yet level-independent. The blurb about it says the energy of the bass signal is compared to the overall signal to determine the bass reduction. lkjb‘s ReFine and QRange plugins are oft used and much beloved, so I was intrigued to find out what this new one had to offer. I’ll break it down based upon my experience testing the plugin out.
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.
“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).
[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.
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.
Packification So i recently helped our mutual friend Brian Funk reorganize his Live Pack Archive, a $10 massive grab bag of Ableton Live goodies assembled from the freebies that he’s been steadily churning out over the years, all the way from the very first pack in 2011 to the contemporary 200th. It’s a lot of stuff! Judging by the plethora of 5-star reviews of the product on gumroad, it seems like people dig it.
Ah, Convenience Sure, you could go download all this stuff one at a time methodically blog post by post. However it’s much easier to just pay the convenience charge and get all the stuff in one bulk download. This collection has been on offer for a while now, but they were basically presented in a big pile of folders. Fun to scout around for sure, but not exactly optimal when it comes to workflow convenience. Power Up! Aha! See, now the collection is even more splendid, as all the devices come consolidated in two mega-packs with similar categories of sounds, effects, and clips sorted logistically for quick perusal and easy implementation directly from the Live browser (including signal previews). Find, grab, and use the stuff you want instantly. It’s very handy and nice. But… the price is still the same? What!? Crazy, i tell you!
Partake Sound intriguing? Well then why don’t you pull up a chair, situate your ass real comfy, and grab yourself some.
⠀⠀⠀I haven’t performed as a DJ in years, focused on raising my son and home studio work instead, but i was pretty active as one around the Colorado Springs area from about 2010 until 2014. One of the my favorite toys to use to manipulate beats live on my laptop was Alexkid’s Instant Haus, which “instantly generates drum patterns to craft into your own house track” (available free via Ableton). It’s great way to add variation to beats in an organic fashion.
⠀⠀⠀Well, i’ve been inspired lately because we now have available the freshest incarnation of beat juggling voodoo in the form of the 501k Creatives new Beat Shaker device, crafted by the very same Alexkid. It’s a similar concept, but greatly expands on the potential and flexibility.
It’s Time I’ve decided that it’s time to write a post going over all the multiband dynamics processors in my audio plugins library. For me, this includes both multiband compressors/expanders as well as dynamic EQs, because i tend to use them for the same general purposes.
