I haven't "blogged" here on KVR in awhile. But, since I am working on an album in the studio right now certain things are coming up that I think you guys might be interested to know. So first let me tell you what I'm up to. I am co-producing an album with Simon Collins (son of Phil) and Nick Davis (engineer/producer of Genesis) which is a concept album that features many songs written or co-written by myself and Simon with loads of keyboards and sound design. We've been working on it all throughout the year and now we're at the final mixing stage up here in freezing cold (at the moment) Vancouver.
Now, a lot of the tracks were played live and not sequenced. Even plug-ins I'd often play live from my computer and go into an API's DI into the other computer for a little "beef" that's added at the analog stage. Don't be afraid to do that in the studio! You might even go into an 1176 perhaps as well... just because it is in the computer doesn't mean it has to STAY in the computer the whole way through and also just because you CAN play it in a DAW doesn't mean you can't also just play it stand alone and NOT quantize. A little live feel (don't look!) can be good sometimes.
Most of the times we'd cut songs to a click track (highly recommended whenever possible) but at least 2 or 3 of the songs were cut live from the floor with extended jam sections that probably wouldn't have happened if we were playing to a click. So there IS a beauty in the freedom not playing to a click but it depends on the song. This music is "progressive rock/pop" so it has instrumental sections and unusual rhythms and quirky musical parts. So click or no click can work well for that style. However, when you DO cut a song to the click it does make editing easier and a lot of the "fixing" you might do in a sequencer you can do with audio such as with Beat Detective or just nudging things around manually.
So, what is Squids like as a keyboard player working on a record? You might think I'd EXCLUSIVELY use Sonic Reality samples but that's not the case. I really don't care what I use as long as I get the result I'm after. So sometimes I'll use my Nord Stage and Wave (although the Wave IS loaded with Sonic Reality samples... and we did a bunch for Clavia that come with it as well which is why I have that rig in the first place but I like it a lot). Normally i have my Motif as well although I need to get the latest XF version because of that 2 gig flash ram capability (especially for live... I LOVE flash ram keyboards!). But then there's my software "go to" rig which includes SampleTank 2.5, Sonik Synth 2, Miroslav Philharmonik, SampleTron and SampleMoog from IK and our own Sonic Reality Infinite Player/Kontakt with Serafine FX Tron and Cinema Sessions as well as our Kapsules (haven't used Drum Masters or Ocean Way Drums much on this because Simon is a great drummer like his dad and we've been getting fantastic LIVE drum sounds in the studio... otherwise I WOULD use them and I've even sampled the Premier and Gretch kits we used on the record which are laid out in iMap just in case... and some of that may be released at some point as well... sounds great!).
I HAVE plenty of other virtual instrument plug-ins but for my needs on this record those "do the trick". Now the way I have my SampleTank set up sound-wise is that I just use that one interface for all of the IK/SR powered by SampleTank plug-ins' sounds. I love the interfaces of those individual plug-ins but the ONLY reason I'd NEED them is if I want to browse to multiple hard drives. However, I like to consolidate ALL of my SampleTank sounds into one folder (even though it does take longer to relist... worth the sacrifice) so that I can COMBINE them in layers. This is where SampleTank can REALLY shine. The layering/processing. You can really SHAPE sounds and create something you hear in your head as long as you have all of the IK powered by SampleTank workstation instruments like that - and especially if you do it the way I am talking about where you put them all in one SampleTank sound folder and browse the ST interface to it.
Anyway, I am going to blog a little bit about using IK and SR products in the studio in this thread. I have some good news for you IK users... there's something coming from IK as well that will allow me to blog through an IK site but more details on that coming soon. In the meantime this has always been a place where we can at least talk about the SOUNDS in that format so let's do some of that and rekindle the Squids mega post on KVR a little bit.
How SampleTank and Sonik Synth came through in the studio
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- Sonic Reality Head Chef
- Topic Starter
- 8566 posts since 11 Mar, 2002 from Florida
Last edited by Squids on Thu Nov 25, 2010 5:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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- Sonic Reality Head Chef
- Topic Starter
- 8566 posts since 11 Mar, 2002 from Florida
I figured I'd make a new post for each of the individual cases of plug-in use I can describe and hopefully this is at least interesting to hear about and gives you some ideas as well. If you're a fan of Genesis, Sigur Ros, Pink Floyd etc. then you may also like our record when it comes out. Somewhat in that style (but more eclectic than that and a heavy dose of classic rock fueled modern alternative... ie lots of vintage sounds and uncommon grooves and chord changes yet it sounds modern and even futuristic in some cases... trippy).
We just started mixing the first song yesterday. At the last minute there was a fill coming out of the bridge that needed impact at the end. There's no crash at the end. It was sort of a "Peter Gabrielish" type of drum fill and I remember hearing Cobham do a fill like that on the album "Passion". There was this "sonic boom" at the end. I have no idea how they did it in their production. But I knew what I wanted to hear. So I pulled up SampleTank and grabbed the Arp 2500 Sine Wave in the BASS folder of Sonik Synth 2. I made the amp envelope decay short so it just had an 808 kick drum decay (come to think of it I could have just used an 808 kick drum too... but the Arp 2500 is a beefy modular and had a little extra harmonics to it besides the "sine"). Then I layered (simply by loading in another part and putting it to the same midi channel... love that in SampleTank! So fast and takes up such little screen space to layer). I loaded up an iMap kit from Sonik Synth 2 as well. I think it was the Ambient kit. I would have just loaded different ones until I got the floor tom sound I was after - round with body to it.
Once I got the kit with the floor tom I liked I transposed and pitched the sine wave to the key of the song (in this case E flat) and laid THAT note on top of the floor tom. It didn't matter what the rest of the kit sounded like because I was just going to hit that floor tom for this "sonic boom" sound. Then I adjusted the cutoff of the low pass filter for that floor tom so it was really warm and boomy (losing the crisp attack but that's ok... it's a boom sound like an explosion that I was after). Then I ran them both through a chain of master effects in SampleTank which was a compressor to give it some BEEF (that compressor in SampleTank is taken from the original T-Racks and it is one of the best sounding compressors I've heard in a sample workstation plug-in... and if you like that wait until you hear the one in SampleTank 3!!!!! And if you read my little blog here I might just do a few hints about the upcoming SampleTank 3 as a reward for reading my mega post!). Then I ran it into the parametric EQ and posted 100 hz for some extra low end (didn't need much though) and then into the CSR Hall in SampleTank with a decay of 10 seconds (maybe I even ended up doing more). Then after that through a low pass filter to get rid of any top end and round it off even more.
After all that I played the boom sound (floor tom single key) into ProTools LE which had the song we were working on (just the tracks turned on that I needed... gonna get ProTools 9 soon so I can "maybe" hear ALL of the tracks on my laptop... but sometimes we have about 140 tracks so I don't know about that. Either way though... not a big deal to pick and choose in a situation like that). So played it in and did a few different velocities and exported it to WAVE. I put the Wave file onto my thumb drive and handed it to the assistant engineer Zach. When they were ready to add it Zach put it in and both Simon and Nick who hadn't heard it yet all this time turned to me and said "Wow that's a GREAT boom!" and they were curious how I came up with one that fit the song so well. I explained to them how I used SampleTank and Sonik Synth to layer, process and shape a tom and a sine wave to "fit" tonally to the song.
Now, to some of you fancy sound designers that's like ABC. I know, I don't expect to win "boom of the year" award for sound design or anything. It was just a practical need that could come up when you're working on a music project. It's good to have SampleTank, Sonik Synth and the other IK plug-ins (and Sonic Reality XT libraries I have too...I did use the harmonics of a guitar as well from one of those on the same song)... it's good to have them around for when you quickly need to "make something" and use the source material to short cut your way there. The very MUSICAL sounding filters of SampleTank and quality EQ, Compression and usable reverb in there along with the layering can "get you there" sometimes... it isn't that it's better than the analog compressors and EQ or the Lexicon and AMS reverbs are better so you should ALWAYS use those if you can... nahhhhh. A lot of the time yes but not always. What is paramount in my opinion is the resulting SOUND and sometimes how FAST you can get it so you don't disrupt the creative flow because that can hurt your mix more than anything.
These sample-based plug-ins with processing like SampleTank are real "workhorse" tools and you can be FAST with them. A "Swiss Army knife" that you pull out whether you're a keyboard player, songwriter, composer or producer or all of the above. Your TIME is valuable and the quicker you can pull out something that FITS to the song the better off you are (especially if you're hired... they'll hire you again if you're fast).
And that's why Nick Davis hired me to help him on the new Genesis album featuring Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett... just kidding. I was seeing if you were paying attention. Hope you liked my story.
We just started mixing the first song yesterday. At the last minute there was a fill coming out of the bridge that needed impact at the end. There's no crash at the end. It was sort of a "Peter Gabrielish" type of drum fill and I remember hearing Cobham do a fill like that on the album "Passion". There was this "sonic boom" at the end. I have no idea how they did it in their production. But I knew what I wanted to hear. So I pulled up SampleTank and grabbed the Arp 2500 Sine Wave in the BASS folder of Sonik Synth 2. I made the amp envelope decay short so it just had an 808 kick drum decay (come to think of it I could have just used an 808 kick drum too... but the Arp 2500 is a beefy modular and had a little extra harmonics to it besides the "sine"). Then I layered (simply by loading in another part and putting it to the same midi channel... love that in SampleTank! So fast and takes up such little screen space to layer). I loaded up an iMap kit from Sonik Synth 2 as well. I think it was the Ambient kit. I would have just loaded different ones until I got the floor tom sound I was after - round with body to it.
Once I got the kit with the floor tom I liked I transposed and pitched the sine wave to the key of the song (in this case E flat) and laid THAT note on top of the floor tom. It didn't matter what the rest of the kit sounded like because I was just going to hit that floor tom for this "sonic boom" sound. Then I adjusted the cutoff of the low pass filter for that floor tom so it was really warm and boomy (losing the crisp attack but that's ok... it's a boom sound like an explosion that I was after). Then I ran them both through a chain of master effects in SampleTank which was a compressor to give it some BEEF (that compressor in SampleTank is taken from the original T-Racks and it is one of the best sounding compressors I've heard in a sample workstation plug-in... and if you like that wait until you hear the one in SampleTank 3!!!!! And if you read my little blog here I might just do a few hints about the upcoming SampleTank 3 as a reward for reading my mega post!). Then I ran it into the parametric EQ and posted 100 hz for some extra low end (didn't need much though) and then into the CSR Hall in SampleTank with a decay of 10 seconds (maybe I even ended up doing more). Then after that through a low pass filter to get rid of any top end and round it off even more.
After all that I played the boom sound (floor tom single key) into ProTools LE which had the song we were working on (just the tracks turned on that I needed... gonna get ProTools 9 soon so I can "maybe" hear ALL of the tracks on my laptop... but sometimes we have about 140 tracks so I don't know about that. Either way though... not a big deal to pick and choose in a situation like that). So played it in and did a few different velocities and exported it to WAVE. I put the Wave file onto my thumb drive and handed it to the assistant engineer Zach. When they were ready to add it Zach put it in and both Simon and Nick who hadn't heard it yet all this time turned to me and said "Wow that's a GREAT boom!" and they were curious how I came up with one that fit the song so well. I explained to them how I used SampleTank and Sonik Synth to layer, process and shape a tom and a sine wave to "fit" tonally to the song.
Now, to some of you fancy sound designers that's like ABC. I know, I don't expect to win "boom of the year" award for sound design or anything. It was just a practical need that could come up when you're working on a music project. It's good to have SampleTank, Sonik Synth and the other IK plug-ins (and Sonic Reality XT libraries I have too...I did use the harmonics of a guitar as well from one of those on the same song)... it's good to have them around for when you quickly need to "make something" and use the source material to short cut your way there. The very MUSICAL sounding filters of SampleTank and quality EQ, Compression and usable reverb in there along with the layering can "get you there" sometimes... it isn't that it's better than the analog compressors and EQ or the Lexicon and AMS reverbs are better so you should ALWAYS use those if you can... nahhhhh. A lot of the time yes but not always. What is paramount in my opinion is the resulting SOUND and sometimes how FAST you can get it so you don't disrupt the creative flow because that can hurt your mix more than anything.
These sample-based plug-ins with processing like SampleTank are real "workhorse" tools and you can be FAST with them. A "Swiss Army knife" that you pull out whether you're a keyboard player, songwriter, composer or producer or all of the above. Your TIME is valuable and the quicker you can pull out something that FITS to the song the better off you are (especially if you're hired... they'll hire you again if you're fast).
And that's why Nick Davis hired me to help him on the new Genesis album featuring Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett... just kidding. I was seeing if you were paying attention. Hope you liked my story.
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- KVRer
- 18 posts since 18 Nov, 2007
Sounds like a fantastic project!! Thanks for the details. But I'm obsessing here on your mention of "SampleTank 3" - that's very exciting to hear coming from somebody that's actually in the loop!! What !? When!? Soon?? 
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- Sonic Reality Head Chef
- Topic Starter
- 8566 posts since 11 Mar, 2002 from Florida
Well, the ONLY reason I can even mention it is because IK is showing hints on Facebook so I recommend checking that out. You can at least see what they're sampling for it and probably more as they tease until its ready. Keep in mind nothing official has been announced yet though. But it is in the works. Sonic Reality will be doing sounds for it as well and all of the existing ST2 sounds will be forward compatible and only capable of MORE within the upcoming version 3. Can't say when because I don't know! Even if I did know I couldn't say though. But, as a dealer we're going to do a big launch on www.esoundz.com when it is out. That's for sure.mikefkeys wrote:Sounds like a fantastic project!! Thanks for the details. But I'm obsessing here on your mention of "SampleTank 3" - that's very exciting to hear coming from somebody that's actually in the loop!! What !? When!? Soon??
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- Sonic Reality Head Chef
- Topic Starter
- 8566 posts since 11 Mar, 2002 from Florida
The SampleTank & Sonik Synth saga continues! Boy is it useful! I'm telling you every time I am in the studio it is my secret weapon and there's always someone asking me how I came up with something so quick and then they want to go buy it. That just happened now. I was explaining to one of the engineers how if I wanted a sort of Dark Side of the Moon synth effect I can just go into Sonik Synth and pull out some EMS samples and then start tweaking them in SampleTank with panning delays and autopan effects, filter sweeps... and I own an EMS but I don't have it WITH me everywhere I go and even then this is still FASTER. Gets the job done and that really counts for a lot.
The other thing I like about it is that you can do cool synth parts mixing in acoustic/electric instruments along with synths. Don't be afraid to mangle a perfectly basic instrument like an electric piano. It's just a starting point and even if you take something like a Wurly and make it have a short decay like a synth so it is choppy and then layer it with an analog sound you get this really cool organic mix of things. Hard to explain without playing it... maybe I will play you guys a little sequence loop to hear what I'm talking about... that is if you're interested. Let me know? Otherwise I'll still blog it up here because this is the SR forum and I've been neglecting it I admit. Too much Facebook!
But there's some good "more technical" blogging I can do here so... hope you enjoy it!
The other thing I like about it is that you can do cool synth parts mixing in acoustic/electric instruments along with synths. Don't be afraid to mangle a perfectly basic instrument like an electric piano. It's just a starting point and even if you take something like a Wurly and make it have a short decay like a synth so it is choppy and then layer it with an analog sound you get this really cool organic mix of things. Hard to explain without playing it... maybe I will play you guys a little sequence loop to hear what I'm talking about... that is if you're interested. Let me know? Otherwise I'll still blog it up here because this is the SR forum and I've been neglecting it I admit. Too much Facebook!
But there's some good "more technical" blogging I can do here so... hope you enjoy it!-
- KVRist
- 164 posts since 26 Feb, 2006 from Northern NJ
I have all those as well. I remember you wrote about putting them in the same folder some time ago and I tried it but as you said it take long to relist every time I opened Sample Tank so I put them back to their individual ones. But if the Squids does it that way, then I'd say it's good enough for me. After all we're only talking about less than five minutes and my time is certainly not that valuable to wait especially when the client (me)is paying for itSquids wrote:But then there's my software "go to" rig which includes SampleTank 2.5, Sonik Synth 2, Miroslav Philharmonik, SampleTron and SampleMoog from IK and our own Sonic Reality Infinite Player/Kontakt with Serafine FX Tron and Cinema Sessions as well as our Kapsules
However, I like to consolidate ALL of my SampleTank sounds into one folder (even though it does take longer to relist... worth the sacrifice) so that I can COMBINE them in layers. This is where SampleTank can REALLY shine. The layering/processing. You can really SHAPE sounds and create something you hear in your head as long as you have all of the IK powered by SampleTank workstation instruments like that - and especially if you do it the way I am talking about where you put them all in one SampleTank sound folder and browse the ST interface to it.
Bobn
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
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- Sonic Reality Head Chef
- Topic Starter
- 8566 posts since 11 Mar, 2002 from Florida
Well if you uncheck "relist on start up" in the preferences or whatever it's called then it only does it once and loads pretty fast. Once the first time you save I think. Anyway I think it's manageable. The benefits of being able to layer all the sounds are too good for me. But another way to work is to sometimes (if you know exactly what sounds you're using) is you can put those in a duplicate folder and browse to that. Then it is super fast. It is not a big deal to browse to different folders really. Depends on where you're at. If you're still hunting for sounds then it is good to have as much as possible available in the tank. If you've already picked your sounds... that's different. Although I like to print to audio and then you don't need the plug-in at all anymore (save it back in a previous version in case you need to go back). But that's me. I like it in audio so it can be imported/exported into studio ProTools systems or just called up no matter what later on in case you need the EXACT resulting sound.
