Polyphonic audio editing by Melodyne

One of the best tools in my small arsenal of plug-ins is Celemony Melodyne.  I was writing tunes for Ed Goldfarb of Madcap Labs for a few radio spots at the time and he envisioned the need to do some pitch shifting with it at the time so he asked that I get a copy.  I got it as a student discount so it didn't put me out much.  Ultimately, I never got the chance to use it in the ways that Ed envisioned.


But i find myself turning to Melodyne for at least a part of nearly every track I write now.  Basically, Melodyne is an amazingly sick pitch/time shifting tool.  It can scan, for example, a monophonic sample (or a whole bass part for that matter) and convert it into a piano roll with each note existing on the piano roll seperate from each other.  What does this enable?  Real-time editing of a static wave file as if it were a series of midi-notes.  This is so completely useful, it's disgusting.

A few years back they updated Melodyne to work with polyphonic sound.  Essentially you could time stretch polyphonic material out as far as your little heart desired, and you would hear no side effects of the stretching.  Just pure, pristine stretched sound which, before I heard it for myself, I didn't believe.  This type of stretching is SO useful in creating your own sounds out of nearly nothing.

Try this:  Find a 20 second sample on a CD... atmospheres are AWESOME for this.  Bring this atmosphere into Melodyne, then stretch the audio file out so that it becomes a 10 minute sample.  With Melodyne's immaculate time stretching abilities, it creates an amazingly entrancing, evolving pad out of the sound.  A sound designer's dream, really.

So the big news comes by way of an email I received from Celemony this afternoon.  At the International Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Germany, Celemony displayed a new feature to come out in the Fall called Direct Note Access.  This feature allows you to scan a polyphonic audio file (for example, a 6 string guitar playing a soliloquy) and break EACH NOTE out on the piano roll.  You can then do things like make a minor guitar chord a major guitar chord?!  You could mute certain strings and allow others to come through.

Ladies and gents, this is something I have dreamed of but never figured I'd see.  How the hell do these people do this stuff?!  it blows me away.

Take a look at the video to see what I mean.  This is truly revolutionary in the world of professional audio, and I really hope Melodyne gets some much deserved time in the spotlight for figuring this out.  I wouldn't be surprised if these guys get bought out by some of the other big guns just for the insight into the technology.  Mindblowing.  Pieces everywhere.

Two Night Drive tracks near finished

I am cranking away on two separate remixes for Night Drive Music.

JP and Jones "Cut One" is the first one. Ended up taking a bit of a funk approach with the bass line. Lot's of subtitle high end layering, and a few lush pads to soften it up. Happy with this one AND it only took me three weeks start to finish.

Mark Cotterell's "Tiz Parts" is the second remix, and this one started off super minimal. I have read a little about modern minimal house production and decided to try out a few things with it. This track has only taken me 4 total production sessions to bring it to near completion! i tell you, sometimes the tracks write themselves. Of course, the flip side to that is sometimes it's like murder trying to finish one up.

I'm really proud of a snap/clap sound that really gives the remix some serious dimension and space. Verbed out the clap, edited together two quick snaps together, stereo separation to split them up and make it sound like a few people snapping, then bumped it forward in time about 45ms before each clap hit. The result really sounds like 3-4 people in a room keeping tempo with the track by themselves.

Not sure when these will see an official release, but it seems they will be on two separate EPs sometime over the next 6-8 months, I'd imagine. As always, keepin' ya posted.

The Force Vol 4 - 12" vinyl release

The folks at Night Drive Music have release a track from my recent "Raygun - The Remixes" EP on colored vinyl along with a few other choice tracks from NDM artists. This is very exciting! Jeff Bennett turned out one of the standout remixes on the EP, and gets the royal treatment on the 12" as the top billing.

Tracklist:
A1 – Raygun – 1st of the year (Jeff Bennett Remix)
A2 – Alectric – Selected Moments (Neurotron Remix)
B1 – Tom Pooks - Yessid
B2 – Vas Floyd – Deep House Soul (JP and Jones Remix)

You can check it out in limited release 12", and of course, there's always digital.

And while we're on the topic of selling music right in the digital age, Night Drive Music offers most of their music in the following formats:
Vinyl, CD, DVD, MP3, MP4, WMA, WAV, OGG, AIF, FLAC... Talk about choice!

Preview the release:

New collaboration project

Ivan I and myself are ready to tackle a new project after taking a few months off for the busy holidays. And it's about time. We've working with each other for a few years now, and really come along way in our abilities, and quality of our productions.

We will be working in the studio of fellow label mate DJ Adnan to remix the last original track we wrote at the end of 2007. This should all see an official release on Tarantic Records.

I have also been approached by Night Drive Music to complete two new remixes for the label. So I must get busy on those as well. I got the source sounds and I like what I received. It's a lot more enjoyable when you actually find a little inspiration in the remix sounds. I'm ready to crank a few out.

Pro Tools 7.4 released!

The newest upgrade to Pro Tools (version 7.4) is now officially released!  I purchased the update for $49 last Wednesday, and with the total rebuild of my newly received replacement hard drive after the total crash I wrote about earlier, it was the perfect opportunity to install and test drive some of the newest features in the update.

The one I anticipated the most was the main new feature of the update, something called Elastic Time.  Using a special file browser in Pro Tools, you can scan your available sounds, and preview everything from within that window.  This is proving much more intuitive than using the Import command.  You like a sound, you simply drag it over into your Edit space and a new track is created for it.

Within the new browser window, you can enable a fit-to-tempo option.  Each time you highlight a new sound, the Elastic Time algorithm scans the sound to determine beats and bar length.  With the fit-to-tempo mode activated, the loop will then preview in the tempo context of your track.  If you have your track playing during this process, the highlighted sound will preview along with the track.  So now you know what a loop sounds like within the track without having to import it (if you have a hunch it'll work) and fit it to the tempo manually using something like Beat Detective to make it work.  This literally cuts the time down tremendously and is going to save me so much time and head scratching in future tracks.

There are different algorithm selections that can determine how Elastic Time processes your sound.  Rhythmic, Polyphonic, Monophonic and Vari-Speed (like speeding up a tape deck, so does the pitch.)

On my increasingly outdated G4, this whole process of evaluating the loop, running it through the algorithm, then previewing the loop in context, takes a few seconds with each sound.  It's not as snappy as I wish it could be (or figure it probably WOULD be on a current Mac)... but it isn't a deal breaker.  It just requires a little bit of patience.  And for the added convenience once the track is imported INTO the track, it's well worth it.

Whispering sweet gigabytes into my ear

All seemed lost.  I don't know why I even decided to try.  But I woke up Saturday morning with a thirst to press my luck and see if for some strange reason I might be able to tap into my destroyed hard drive to salvage all of the important data that would have otherwise cost me $2700 to restore.  I connected the drive to my Mac, booted up... nothing.

I restarted in Safe mode, nothing.  I rebooted into Diskwarrior, it couldn't see the drive.  Nothing.  I booted off of my OS X install disk to try to run Disk Utility from there.  Nothing!!!!!

The only reassuring thing was the fact that the drive was making clicking noises again.  If you read my previous entry here, at one point the drive altogether stopped making any noises whatsoever, signaling defeat to my efforts to restore my lost audio projects on a brand new drive.  But those noises that I was hearing this Saturday morning invigorated me to push ahead.  And let me tell you, am I happy I did.

As I sit there, reading movie blogs on my work laptop, allowing the drive to click away on my desktop Mac for three hours, I realized after filling another cup of coffee that the drive wasn't clicking anymore.  I looked up at the computer and sure enough, the drive had mounted!  I mean, I couldn't access any files on it, but it freakin' mounted!  More than it had done since the moment it crashed a few days prior.  I'm not sure why, but by god I wasn't asking questions.  I continued to try and repair the drive using Disk Utility.  And finally, after another hour, the progress bar appeared, moved, and I was blessed with a "Repair Successful" message!  Holy crap!

I rebooted into Safe mode, and immediately started dragging files off of the drive onto my other drives in order of importance.  25 gigs of audio projects?  Saved.  7 gigs of photos? Saved.  iTunes library and CD library? Saved.  My Documents? Saved.

A mere gig away from the totally salvation of all important documents, the drive starts to make the noises again.  Progress freezes.  The drive is busted again.

I decided I'd accept the gift given to me... that I was able to nearly restore almost all of my files...  But dammit, there was a gig left that I didn't get, and by god I wanted it!  So I spent more time trying to gain access, and after another hour of effort, the drive decided to give me one last shot.  It worked again!

So I then transferred the gig of files over, and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that the second that final file transferred over, the drive started to make the noises again.  It was done.

You know the overly dramatic scene in so many movies where the person who is about to die asks their confidant to come closer so as to hear the big secret whispered into their ear before they pass for good?  Yeah, the drive was about to choke.  And I was the confidant, given one last chance.  The drive whispered my files (about 100gigs of files to be exact) onto the other random drives on my system... one last transfer, and then it died.

After a total of 7 hours, all data was recovered.

I can't even tell you how lucky I feel to be given this second chance.  Most of this data is now backed up to DVD.  I am also considering off site backup.  Amazon's S3 service keeps coming up, so maybe I'll figure out a system to backup my current year's worth of audio projects off site on a regular basis.  Then once January hits, take the previous year and backup to DVD.  I don't know, still working on that.

I'm going to post something about all of the other data-recovery solutions that were recommended to me by far too many kind individuals who read my Tweets as well as my first blog post on this topic.  Some interesting tidbits there, and nearly all of them rendered unneeded because of my sheer luck this weekend.  Nonetheless, thanks for the kind words!

Oh yeah, have you done YOUR backup yet?

Backup your shit!!!

Seriously!  Why you puttin' it off, huh?  Yeah, I'm talkin' ta you!

OK, some background here.  A few months back I purchased a brand spankin' new Seagate internal drive.  300gb of storage, to replace an older 150gb drive that was starting to show it's age.  I decided to take this new found space to dig through all of my other five hard drives to consolidate and create one unified place for all data that I NEEDED to backup to DVD.  Then, once I had everything moved to this new drive, I would begin the process of burning it all.  Well, wouldn't you know it, my DVD-burner fizzled and died.  So I ordered a new one.  And my data lay waiting on this new hard drive.

Well, a few weeks ago, I got the DVD Burner and installed it.  FINALLY!  I could get everything onto a permanent format and be done with it.  Well, I wasn't quick enough to the punch.  Two days ago, I started to hear some grinding noises coming from my hard drive.  Those noises got progressively louder, and quick!  I knew something was wrong, so I tried right then to move all of the data over to another external hard drive.  It slowly churned to try and begin the request.  10 minutes later (and many loud noises), my computer froze.  I did a hard restart and sure enough, because one partition on this hard drive belonged to my OS, my computer wouldn't boot up.  Nothing worked.  It just kept clicking at me.  And then to my horror, it's stopped doing that.  Which told me "this drive ain't even alive anymore."

Thanks to Veronica Belmont, I checked out DriveSavers.  This is where things got really scary.  Alright, people.  Two key things you should learn from my mistake here:

1. Just cause it's a new drive doesn't mean it won't fail.  It's the stupid assumption I made, and I tell you, I'm paying the price for it.  Of all the data that fizzled and died are all of my music projects from 2000-2005.  Probably around 80 different music projects.  Gone!  My whole CD collection?  My iTunes library?  Gone!  Who knows what pictures from the past year?  Gone (Luckily, I had been a bit better at backing up my photo library so I have most of my pictures from before 2007)  Other things that I have absolutely no idea anymore cause I thought nothing of moving them to this backup receptical only to watch them disappear?  Gone.

2. Just cause it's technically possible to recover data after the fact doesn't mean you'll be able to afford the operation.  I mean, I always heard that this stuff was expensive.  But I never realized just HOW expensive it really is!  So check this out.  When you agree to have data recovered from a hard drive, you are asked what data is the most important to you.  If they recover no data at all, that's $200 just for trying.  That's your entrance fee whether you enjoyed the show or not. If they recover any data, your looking at a $900 entrance fee.  The more data that they recover that you listed as "important to you" the higher the cost.  So if I tell them that the most important pieces of data on my drive are the audio projects from 2000-2005, and they recover all of those files, I'm out the maximum of $2700.

Cuh-shing!!!!!!!!  That's right.  I knew this was pricey.  I never imagined it was THAT pricey?!  My god, it took my breath away.  A company with mission-critical data on damaged drives might be able to justify that kind of money but I... Mr. lowly independent music producer with hardly enough money to buy a new hard drive for that matter, can not.  Sorry to say.

So I find myself trying to figure out how much five years worth of work is worth to me.  What WOULD I pay to recover the data (in the best case scenario, mind you, where the data is actually recoverable)...  What am I willing to pay to even see if it's worth it?

To be clear, I have most of the actual final products of each audio project.  But I am a pack rat.  I like to know that I have all of my time and effort filed away to turn to ten years from now when I want to try to remix an oldie.  Now I can not.

Learn from my mistake.  If your thinking about backing up your shit, chances are it's cause you really need to.  And if you really need to, then chances are you've already waited long enough.  Get... it... done.  NOW!

Jesu is on the horizon for tonight...

A lifelong Justin Broadrick fan (Godflesh and now Jesu), I am ecstatic to see these guys play tonight at the Great American Music Hall.

A friend that I'm going to the show with sent me the link to this clip from the opening of their first set in San Francisco at Bimbos 365 on April 6th, 2007. I was at the show... first time I ever had the chance to see Justin play live music in front of my face, and it was just one of those experiences that you wait so long for... and once it finally happens, it's about as cool as you ever thought it would be. Something about their shoegaze infused metal really strikes a chord with me. So to say the very least, I am stoked out of my mind for tonights show.

Here's the clip from their last SF appearance:




Oh and, by the way, that's me at the beginning yelling "I've been waiting 12 years for this shit." Awesome, I've been immortalized in the bootleg circuit. Fine by me. Any way I can get myself attached to the Broadrick world, the better. Maybe I'll have the chance to meet Justin tonight. Yeah, right.

Remix from the sky!

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I found myself inspired to write a solo track.  Turns out I had promised Christian Paduraru a remix of his track "Unconditional Giving."  Ivan and I attempted to get it started but weren't moving in a direction that we cared for so we bailed.

As I started this new track, I thought "hmmmm, maybe if I throw Christian's sounds over the top and work with them a bit, it'll work."  Sure enough, it totally works!

Not sure where this track will see the light of day, but he anticipates releasing it sometime in December.  Man, if only I could complete a track in one week every time!

Also, updated my online resume (finally!)

Pro Tools 7.4 coming soon!

And it has some seriously cool features that I have been WAITING for. The ability to preview loops in the context of your track in real time, what sounds to be an improved time stretch algorithm, and easy MIDI controls for rewire instruments (something that blows me away that it's taken this long to figure out?!)

Here's a video that's pretty sweet: