Experiments in automation, part 1

I've been trying to add dynamicism and interest to my tracks by paying careful attention to the general momentum of a groove and changing things up when necessary. I find that my grooves can get very stale - they will sound good for a couple bars then begin to sound repetitive. I've always thought "hey, when you write grooves they often get old quickly but when you play them they definitely have more life, so why don't you play them?" with that in mind I started messing around with the automation controls on my mini keyboard. It has a bunch of knobs and sliders - mine is all busted up but here is an example of a nice new one.

 

 Take a look at it. You see it has eight vertical sliders among other controls. There are also eight rotary knobs above them, and the 4x4 grid of pads to the left. You can easily control various parameters of your software synths and effects by mapping them to these controls, so that they are quite literally right at your fingertips.

At first I mapped each slider to a different parameter, and while I was able to change the sound in cool ways, it's pretty much next to impossible to manipulate these things with dexterity while also playing a keyboard line, especially if you have to manipulate several at a time!

The solution - I mapped a total of 6 parameters to a single slider - the leftmost one in the diagram that says "Trk01Pan". Now, when I move this slider up and down, my 6 chosen parameters also change all at the same time. Here are the specific items I mapped to the slider:

  So what does this all mean? The first two columns to the left are the midi channel and the note/control number. This is just telling my software (Ableton Live) which slider to pay attention to (the first one, and only the first one). The path and name columns determine which instrument (e.g. the Drum track) and parameter (e.g. the filter cutoff frequency) to manipulate, as well as the minimum and maximum ranges. In the case of the drum track, the filter will be set to 26.0 Hz when the slider is all the way at the bottom, and will be set to 19.9 kHz when the slider is all the way at the top.

 You'll also see that for other instruments, I narrowed the acceptable range a bit - the Bass | Auto Filter device is only allowed to go down to 200 Hz.

By automating these parameters all with a single slider, I am able to create fairly interesting/complex effects with just a single hand gesture... which is super helpful if I'm also trying to play live!

 So what I am trying to do here? For this experiment I wanted to replicate a "Deadmau5 style" progressive house buildup. With a single control!

Note that the track itself is really just a demonstration, I wasn't going for artistry here :)

 In Ableton here is what the track looks like - you have a drum loop, two slightly different synth loops, and a bass loop:

 

And here is what it sounds like, before adding any automation. Note the slider didn't move at all throughout the whole recording below.
 

Now, here's what it looks like after recording the automation in Ableton. You can see I've expanded each track view to show the recorded automation lines for each device/instrument that I'm manipulating. The upwards line represents the movement of the slider, from the bottom to the top of its range.

 

And here is what it sounds like:


Pretty cool, right? And this is a very simple example of what automation can do. Listen for it on some of my upcoming work!

Yours in the world of music,

Jeremy