Jonathan’s blog is a blog about the state of the music industry


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Protools tips

here are some tips for protools - how to cram more into your session, and a few shortcuts that i use

the first thing is to use a lot of busses.
I usually group all my drum tracks together then fling an aux after it, and route all the outputs of the audio tracks from the drums to the aux chan. that way i can place individual eq on each drum track…

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Effects Tutorial 1 - compressors

this one might seem a little easy for some people, but it essential that everyone knows it - what is a compressor, and how to use it correctly.
basically a compressor takes the incoming audio and squeezes it, making the louder bits quieter and the quieter bits louder. you have control over how much compression you add to incoming audio. there are four main controls on a compressor - threshold, compression…

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abelton tutorial number 6 - using reason inside abelton

if your like me, then you love using abelton, but you also love making drum beats with reason.
you can use your reason drumbeats (and anything else you have) inside abelton.

its an easy process once you know how to do it, and you can save the setup as a template, so that when you open abelton its already wired for use with reason.

so fire up abelton and lets get going.

basically im going to show you with pictures how to :
1) create new audiotracks
2) set the input to reason
3) wire up reason so that the individual drum sounds have a channel inside abelton
4) save the setup as a template
5) record the drums from reason inside abelton

so, on with part 1

make a few audio tracks (ctrl+t)

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T in the park

i just got back in from t in the park, im charging my fone up so that i can put the pics up later on.
all i have to say is that Rage Against The Machine are fucking amaising !
by far the best band that i have ever seen. ever ever ever.
what makes it even better is that it was my birthday.
one problem with things like t in the park is…

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how to use a playstation pad to control abelton

this is a sneaky little one - how to use a playstation pad (or any joystick) as a midi controller to control abelton (or any other music making program that can do midi)

i use a playstation pad to play oldschool games on my pc (using zsnes emulator) ive got one of those little usb convertor thingies so the playstation pad gets recognised as a regular joystick by my machine..

but i…

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abelton tutorial #4 - using a midi controller in abelton - Midi mapping

this is a quick one - im gonna show you how to control abelton with a midi keyboard
i have one of the m-audio ones with the knobs and sliders on it and i use it to control all sorts of things in abelton.

its really easy when you know how, so im gonna explain it as simply as i can.

first thing to do…

open up a session, or start a new one…

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ableton tutorial number 3 - follow actions

ok, here is the third installment of my ableton tutorials - this thime its all about follow actions and automation
whats a follow action you ask - well, you have a loop and it plays through and after it plays it stops playing and launches another loop.
this is by far the best thing about ableton. it means that you can code yoiur songs. so, how to do it ?

well, fire up…

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ableton tutorial #2 - recording, file operations, cool stuff

so, this is the second ableton tutorial, its kinda boring, but will show you some cool things about abelton,
were gonna cover - how to record your loops to a track, how to consolidate parts you have made, saving live sets, and exporting wav files

so, fire up abelton.

make a simple loop, one bar will

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abelton tutorial number 1 - warp markers

ableton tutorial #1

warp markers.

this is the most important and the best thing about abelton - they are called warp markers.
im gonna tell you what they are all about, and im gonna tell you how you can use them to your advantage.

so…
fire up abelton.

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podcasts

hi, ive not added any content now for about 2 weeks as ive been finishing off a lot of college work - its all done now, and i went out partying last night, so my head is really sore just now. ive just started to use itunes as my full time media player - i have used windows media player and winamp for ages now, and ive never really been in to itunes, but my music library was all messed up and winamp kept adding all my samples for some reason, which gets really nasty. windows media player had died a long time ago due to the size of my music library. itunes seems to be working ok for just now, which is cool. one of the things i like most about it is that it fetches all the album artwork from the itunes store, so all my cds now have covers. you also get the cool wee bottom store thing that tells you other tracks that ppl who have bought the song you are listening to have also bought, kinda cheeky, but a cool feature. ive been looking into the podcasts part of itunes too, ive listened to a few podcasts for a few years now, winamp has had this

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