Three Mix-down Techniques That Change Everything

Making electronic music has been my hobby for many years now. I'm no proper musician, though, and  that's probably the reason why techno suits me so well. This style is usually not about complex melodies and strong lyrics. It's all about making your rhythms sound right and getting your synthesizers to produce something nobody has ever heard before. It's the music of sound engineers.

These are the aspects which have been the most interesting to me and I still find myself learning new ways to do things. I won't talk here about common knowledge like equalization, compression or other basic effects. I believe one can easily find all the information he needs in search engines and Youtube.

Instead, today I'd like to write down three mix-down techniques, that I've picked up over the years and which, although being pretty simple concepts, didn't seem at all that obvious to me, until I learned about them.

Live PA Setup - MIDI Synchronization

One of the key points in my vision of how my setup should be is to utilize all the equipment I've gathered trough the years to it's fullest. Most notable part of it is my DJ-ing gear: Allen&Heath Xone:92 mixer and Korg Kaoss Pad 2 effect processor.

Obviously, I've been using them for many years, and connecting their audio sockets is not worth talking about, but one thing I had never tried before was using their MIDI capabilities.

Live PA Setup - Ableton Live

While Bitwig is still beta-testing, Ableton has made a smart move, announcing the long waited release of Ableton Live 9 and offering a discount for Live 8 + free upgrade to 9th version upon it's release. I decided not to wait and ordered it on spot.

It appears I finally have got all the legit software for working on my live performance as well as a great platform for experimenting with new tracks.

The only thing left now are some cables and a decent laptop for running all this stuff when not at home. I wanted to check out Windows 8 to see if it would really make my old Vista laptop less sluggish, but MicroSoft fails to sell the upgrade for Latvian billing addresses, so no luck there yet. 

But at least in home environment I've got everything I need to start preparing and learning to play Live+Reason by MIDI controls fluently.

Audio Encoding Formats - MP3, OGG, FLAC?

No doubt, mp3 has been the most popular audio format for passing around audio files for years. I've used this format at substance.org.lv, usually, at 160-192 kbit/s for mixes and 256 kbit/s for tracks.

Recently, however, I've started to think about other alternatives.

Reason 6

So, I've bought Reason 6 after all.

Few things to note, that may interest other potential buyers:

It can be used right away without waiting for The Dongle to arrive.
However, you have to install special Code Meter software, which causes an annoying Administration Rights dialog to pop up on every Windows start.

Another thing, using "Internet Verification", you have to enter your username and password every time you start Reason. There is no "Remember password" check-box. This is quite stupid, as even all the online poker game clients have "Remember password" option and they are dealing with real money!

Now, after the dongle arrived few days later (and took up last free USB port on the back of my computer), these annoying issues seem to be less disturbing, of course.

The Dongle Nonsense

I've been spending some time recently working on my audio setup, figuring out what is the best way to utilize all my hardware and software, both for everyday use at home and for live performances at gigs.

Part of the plan was to find the perfect combination of legitimate software components, even if this would mean to buy some of them. I do already own a stripped down version of WaveLab and an iZotope Ozone 4 plugin. Both of them use different tricky authorization procedures, but still, downloading, installing and figuring out the activation takes few minutes.

Now, when I watched some of the Reason 6 feature videos, I was pretty impressed by all the new features. It's  still pretty costly, but it seemed that the software might even be worth it. Until I discovered that it requires a dongle or an active internet connection to operate!