Exciting, right? Welcome back. So I'm gonna have to ask you I'll ask you more. I'm sure about this Riverside thing at some point Yeah, it's fun. Welcome back, Tom. Great to have you. Yes, good to be here. Thanks for having me, Brian. Yeah, you are a three time guest at this point now, so you're an elite club. Nope. I checked before we started. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a little while. think it was like, I could tell you what episode it was.
It was, we did number 26. So you were right in the early days, one of the first guests. And then 158. Wow, and what number is this then? This will be somewhere around 370 something, 380 maybe. that, yeah. Oh, thanks man. Well, it's, you know, getting to talk to people like you, you know? It's a great excuse. I think like everyone should just start a podcast so they can find interesting people to talk to and tell them it's a podcast. Never release it, don't tell them it's never being released.
Just chat to interesting people. I mean that is really basically what I did But it's it's good to have you back you've got some new stuff out you've released a lot of stuff since we've last talked but Most recently you've got the essentials pack max for live pack.
So for people listening, they should know that you're a max for live Crafts person you've got so many cool stuff a lot other stuff besides that's max for life, too, but I think you're one of the things I love about what you do is the design, the overall look. you've like, you got it dialed in almost like right from the beginning, which coming from someone like me that I feel like I can't ever decide on anything and there's no continuity to the stuff I do. I always appreciate that.
And you're, you're the look of your stuff is slick and clean, simple, but very informative. And you can just look at it and know. Yeah, thanks. Your Essentials Pack is a great example of that, in that there are these five devices that are just doing one job, which so many of the things we have are like these giant spaceships that complicated so many things interacting. It's nice to have something that just does something well, and that's yeah, exactly.
That, I mean, that's the whole idea behind the pack was exactly that. There's so many things in live where it is this like big kind of complicated effect that can be useful to have all that in one thing, but oftentimes I find I'm like turning a whole bunch of stuff off just to use like one thing. It's like a really good example of that would be the shift device in the essentials pack because Ableton's got the, it's called shifter.
It used to be frequency shifter and then they updated it as a shifter. And basically all I ever use that device for, you can do some cool stuff with it, but all I ever use it for is for tuning drums, like literally just load it up, put it on the frequency shift, and then I'm just like dialing one or two controls. But that device has, cause I got LFOs in it and all kinds of other stuff in it. And I was like, well, I just only ever use these one or two things.
I don't have to look at all this other junk when I'm just tuning my drums. So was like, I'll just make a little max device that does that. It just does the one thing that I want it to do. And then I think that that may have actually been one of the first devices in the pack that then kind of led to all these other, yeah, these are the devices that do very similar things in that.
They're probably like, if I think about it, kind of all the devices in the pack sort of save for one, Ableton can already do everything that they do in various different ways, but they are just like really simplified versions of things that I was using a lot anyway. minus all the junk I didn't need. Right. Yeah, I'm kind of with you actually with the shifter, which I keep wanting to call frequency shifter still.
I always use it for, yeah, I always use it for like, just a warble effect, kind like a tape, because you can program a really slow pitch movement. And then sometimes I would just string together like three of them and they're just all kind of wiggling a little bit. So it sounds like you've got like lousy cassette tape or something. But yeah, a lot of the other stuff is like, I don't really need it too much. Ring modulator, not too much.
the next update to the Essentials pack is the BrineFunk tape warble module where it's just one dial that does all that behind the scenes. that'd be cool. Well, they've kind of done that a little bit with chorus ensemble. Like it's just got the vibrato that you can sort of use in that way. But I think it'd be cool to have one that was less predictable. Just kind the vibrato mode in the chorus ensemble is just like a fixed kind of sine wave modulation.
Well, think you can change the modulation, but it's just going to be at a fixed rate. So actually, I should be taking some notes here because it would be a really cool little device that does that. It's just kind of warbling the pitch a bit, but maybe has some randomization in it, or you can have different waves that blend for fast and slow. think, yeah.
Well, that's Speaking of the Essentials pack, kind of has been my idea with the Essentials pack is that there are these five initial devices that I made, but there's going to be more. I've already got, I think there was kind of three ideas for new devices I want to add. Now I've got a fourth one, the Tape Warble. And so hopefully it's going to be a pack that will just kind of grow over time, but with this sort of same kind of concept of these really simple kind of one or two knob devices.
Yeah, I love it. I think it's smart and it's also just really practical. Sometimes you just want that thing. Let's go. Let's move on. And rather than dialing it all in and all that, it's definitely cool. You've got a cool framework for it too, for people downloading it, pay if you can, which I haven't heard that before. I've heard pay what you want, pay, you know, optional or whatever. But how does that work for you?
Do you think, do you think that is I always wonder about that with my own packs, right? Like, what if I just made it this or made it that or, you know, the psychology of selling stuff.
so there's, guess there's kind of an interesting, but also maybe not so interesting story behind why I went that route is, I mean, the long, the long version of the story is I used to use Gumroad as my, my store, which anybody listening, I'm sure if you're into music tech, you've definitely come across Gumroad at some point to download something or other. and they have a, now I can't remember what it is.
pay what you want is their model where the kind of buyer just can set that you can like set a recommended price and then the buyer can set however much they want to pay. And it's really easy to do that in in kind of Gumroad. But then fast forward a couple of years and I moved over to WordPress and WooCommerce for my store, which has been on the whole really, really great. I've been happy with the move. But what happens with WooCommerce is to add kind of extra functionality to your store.
you usually have to buy some kind of extension. And so there is a pay what you want extension for WooCommerce, but you got to pay for it yearly. It's really not a lot. like $50 a year kind of thing. But it's just this extra thing that you sort of have to add to WooCommerce. And so when I was thinking about, want to make this pack, I wanted to make the pack kind of fairly accessible to people, but also sort of still maybe get some money from it.
I was like, oh, well, how can I do but not have to go through all this extra hassle of installing this WooCommerce plugin. And I was like, well, what if I just did this pay if you can thing where it's it's kind of free, it's kind of paid. It's basically, I guess the way I think about it is like, it is a paid pack and I've sort of priced it at what I think it would be worth if it was a paid pack, but there's this little option for, you can just download it for free.
A really good example of this, I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but one of my favorite plugin companies is this company called Freakshow Industries. and they have this option called, steal this plugin. So they sell all their plugins. They're actually great. Their whole vibe, it kind of leans into their vibe. They've got this weird kind of dystopian graphic design, kind of anarchic, crazy sort of effects are super fun. But yeah, they have this on their product pages.
It's like a regular plugin product page where you can pay whatever. And there's a little button below that says, do you want to steal this plugin? And it essentially lets you download the plugin for free, but kind of guilt trips you into feeling like you're stealing the plugin, which is great. So it's kind of something along those lines where it's like, actually this thing, this is how much I think it's worth. But you know, if you wanna support, pay for it.
If you can't afford it right now, if you wanna come back and support it later, then yeah, just hit the download for free button and away you go. Hmm, that's cool. I like that. And that's a funny thing, steal this plugin. A little bit of guilt, but maybe also the rebel inside you gets to be fulfilled without any consequences. though, because I've gone back.
I haven't ended up using all their plugins, but there's one that I use quite a lot, and I've gone back and ended up paying for that one, which I generally try to do anyway with anything that I get for free if I can support the creator in some way. So you do kind of, I'm sure not everyone does, but you do kind of almost feel compelled if you end up using it to go back. And it's kind of like an infinite free trial, I guess. Yeah. it's cool. Yeah, I'm like the same as you.
I mean, I want everything I'm doing to be accessible. Like, it's not gonna break your bank or something. I'm usually, so if people reach out, which they have in the past, I'll usually just say, yeah, here you go. Like you can have it. It's not like we're trying to get rich off of hopeful producers, but it's time and work too.
That's a cool way to go about yeah, and, and I mean, to, report back on the success of my experiment, my pay if you can experiment, it's actually been, it was very surprising to me because it, it kind of did about the same numbers as I would have normally done if I'd made it a paid pack. So I can, I'm happy to report that people are willing to pay for things and support if you kind of ask them to, which is really good to hear.
and obviously really happy that there was so many people that were willing to, kind of pay for it. The actual, what was great about it though, is I probably got way more downloads than I would have gotten if I'd made it a paid pack, but ended up sort of selling about the same as I kind of normally do. So it sort of almost worked exactly the way I'd hoped is that more people got access to it, but I was still kind of able to, kind of recoup for my time for working on stuff.
So it, it may be a model I just continue to use. That's cool. I find similar stuff with the free packs that I put out. They obviously get more reach than stuff that are paid for. But you can add money in there. When you do the gumroad thing, you could either put the zero in or you could add whatever. sometimes the free ones wind up making more than some of the for sale ones. Like, who knows? It's always a funny...
After I finish something anyway, I'm like, okay, let's see if anyone wants this, anyone likes this. And sometimes you're really surprised at what works and some of the things that don't work, you're like, I don't get it. Like, this is so cool. Well, in a way it's kind of actually how I got started down this road.
Cause I mean, I'm sure you've spoken about this on previous podcasts, but the sort of way that elephant kind of came about in the way that it is now is I was just making stuff for myself and I was like, this stuff is kind of useful. Maybe other people will find it useful. Put it up on gum road for free with the pay, won't you one thing just thinking like, you know, it's just out there. Maybe some people download it and then people ended up paying for it.
And I was like, Hey, this kind of cool maybe I could actually do this as thing that I do for a living kind of thing and one thing led to another and here I am today so the yeah the pay what you want is it's my superhero origin story Nice. That's a good one. It's like a noble and, you know, proper good. It's not like some evil thing that happened that turned you into a villain. And you've also got the new album, which I think you're...
Now, you're one to kind of play around with letters and language, so I'm assuming you call it Consul, the artist's name. but the L is like a forward slash and then it's called microcosms. Microcosmos Cosmos, I wrote that too. Microcosmos, okay, fun. But the Cs are brackets, they're like parentheses. Yeah. so there's, I guess there's two stories in each of those names.
I mean, the first is I do, I don't know why I do this to myself, but I do love choosing like kind of complex names that then give me all kinds of problems down the line, because it's harder to Google or whatever it happens to be, or as I was kind of aware of when I went into it, but now I have realized is more of a problem than I thought it was going to be is obviously a forward slash is kind of a reserved character and a lot of like file systems and things.
So when I'm trying to name files with the slash in it, it's sometimes some pla - some platforms like it, some platforms don't. So then I just, I just use the L instead. but that the reason for the slash is one, I thought it kind of looked cool, but two is there actually is already an artist who doesn't seem to be active anymore, but was kind of around the 90s, think, according to Wikipedia, who was already called Consol. So I hey, I want to be a little bit different to that.
And then the album itself is, I don't know you're familiar with the band called, what I always thought they were called Sun -O, but apparently it's just pronounced Sun. They're a doom metal drone kind of band, but it's spelt S -N -U, then bracket, bracket, bracket, bracket.
brackets like I can't remember how many but so apparently you don't say the the bracket I actually think it's and then brackets but apparently you don't say the and bracket part you just say son is how it's pronounced so the the bracket thing was inspired by that I wonder if they have those same issues with either files or people finding them. they're a pretty kind of obscure band, so I'm sure they lean into it.
I actually, can highly recommend if you ever see them playing near you, well worth checking out. I saw them recently and it was the most insane show I've ever been to. It's two guys on guitar, but they're like, their whole vibe is that they're kind of like one of the loudest and heaviest bands like to ever exist is sort of their vibe. They both come out on stage.
fully robed, in kind of druid robes with their guitars and just like tons of smoke, more amps than I've ever seen on a stage in my life, just stacks and stacks of amps. And then no exaggeration, the loudest thing I've ever experienced in my life, just loud, heavy droney, kind of almost like a physical psychedelic experience because it's so loud that you just sort of feel the physicality of the sound.
I went to the show with a friend and we kind of both walked out of the show afterwards and we were like, what did we just experience? What was this crazy thing? So, can highly recommend it. It was very good. We'll look them up and put them in the show notes. No drummer or just two guitars.
two guitarists it's kind of if you can sort of imagine what you think drone if you've never listened if you've never listened to drone music and you imagine what does drone music sound like they're kind of very typical of that it's just sort of long single notes that kind of drone on for five minutes but slowly kind of modulating in tone and very very heavy lots of distortion very cool if you're into that kind of thing Yeah, hey, something different, you know? Be worth checking out.
Nice. So your record, which is great, by the way, I really enjoyed it. And something we should point out to people too is that they can download the Ableton Live sets with it, which is a really nice touch. So they can see behind the curtain what you're doing. Yeah, so that's something I've kind of always wanted to do and for one reason or another just haven't gotten round to it because as I kind of discovered doing this one was that it's quite a lot of work to put together.
Mostly because just, I guess with the way that I've worked and I think is probably pretty common in electronic music, there are various bits things that have gone into the music, that be like samples I've used, Max for live devices I've used, that I don't have the licenses, I have the licenses to obviously use them in the music, but not to distribute.
So what that meant is then I had to go through every Ableton project and either remove those and replace them with something alternative or just like freeze and flatten the tracks. So was more like a kind of a stem. So that was quite a long process to sort of go through and just make sure I wasn't kind of distributing any content I didn't have the rights to distribute.
and then packaging them into an Ableton Live pack, collecting all the samples, lots of little kind of admin work that was required. But I think it was worth it in the end. I'm really glad I did it because it's cool to be able to share that with people.
I've had lots of good responses from people saying, it's really interesting to see how you put that together, or it's really interesting to see that because I'm quite a minimalist sort of producer, to see that you don't need to use hundreds and hundreds of tracks to get certain sounds. Yeah, so I think it was a worthwhile thing to Yeah, that was something that struck me right away was it's not that many tracks, as many as I would have expected.
And then I was also noticing how neat everything was. So I was wondering if maybe you sort of cleaned your room a little bit before you invited people over to see what's going on in there. Or is that just how you like to work? That's just kind of how I work. I'm maybe overly so. I to be pretty kind of tidy. I think there's definitely a degree of keeping things organized from a workflow point of view to be able to find things quickly.
So lot of the other music that I've worked on over the years has always been collaborative. And so I know from my experience of working with other music producers how just messy things can be. And if I receive a project file from a collaborator and there's like track two and track 43, I'm like, well, what, what are any of these? So my first step is to always go through and just like label the tracks. Okay. That's a base. This is a synth.
So when I'm working on the session, I can kind of find that. And so when I'm working by myself, usually there's like a period of just kind of free creativity where I'm writing. I'm not worrying about keeping things organized. And then there's like a little bit after my sort of creative session where it's like. let's go in and just kind of tidy this up a bit so the next time I come back to the session I sort of know where everything is.
And then over the years I've also kind of just developed a particular color scheme for things that just like at a glance I can see where certain things are. like kind of shades of brown is always drums and percussion, blue is always bass, there's all sorts of different things. And so that genuinely from like a workflow perspective I find incredibly useful and definitely recommend to people because saves a lot of time digging around for things.
But then there's probably like another level of maybe too much organization that I go into just kind of for my own personal sort of OCD -ness. But so, yeah. So the way the sessions look is generally how my sessions do end up looking when I'm That's good. And you make a great point. Like you have to know what's going on. And even when it's your own stuff, you think you're going to remember that, you know, Trek seven is like that weird percussion thing you did.
But by the time you get a few hours or days down the road, it's really easy to be like, well, what was that again? And especially if you're going to open it up at a later date, you're just not going to remember that stuff. So having that as part of your workflow is a smart idea. Yeah, the other thing that I do that I find quite useful is track order, which I've had for years and years is I'll generally always have like drum and percussion stuff at the bottom of all my tracks.
kind of almost think of it like in a frequency spectrum way. So sort of drums kind of sit at the base, then I'll have bass above that, then kind of pads and paddy synths lead stuff vocals is kind of at the top of the track stack because I mix all my own stuff. So when I get to mixing that also then makes it really easy to quickly get to things and know where things are sitting in the mix as I'm kind of working. it all sort of feeds into like a workflow kind of thing.
do almost the same thing except I start with the drums on the left or at the top, know, depending on which view you're looking at. And then it kind of works its way up even though it's going down. Your way probably makes more sense. But I just got used to always having my drums on the left. Like the first thing is there and I don't have the colors though. Within a project, I'll usually color everything to make sense. But yeah, I don't know why I never decided like drums are red.
or anything like that, just so I always know. It seems like something I should have been doing forever now. I to start. it's one of those things that like even more so than a track name, it's quicker to just see like the color stands out a lot quicker than the actual name of the track at a glance.
So yeah, I can definitely recommend That stuff really does help though, because when you're trying to be in the zone, like, it's the most fragile mindset there is, I think, where everything can pull you out at a moment's notice. So if you're trying to, what happened to that track? Where is it? What is this one? Like, then suddenly you're not in it anymore. Yeah, exactly. I was also very surprised and impressed by your discipline with like your levels.
You know, I feel like every time I work on something, no matter what, I'm trying to always be mindful of headroom, right? But inevitably you just wind up cranking things because it's louder, always sounds more fun. But your mixes with nothing on the master bus on the tracks I looked at had so much headroom, you only going like halfway up the master meter and then all of that room. Tell me about that. How do you make that happen?
so the first thing I guess to add to that is the one thing that is missing from all those projects is the actual masters, because that I did separately, everything kind of gets mixed down and then bounced out of Ableton and I mastered that externally. So that was the one thing that was missing from those projects, In terms of the kind of level or sort of gain staging of things, I think it's less of a thing people need to really be concerned about these days.
Cause like DAWs, one DAWs have so much headroom anyway. I'm sure you're probably aware, but maybe if people are listening onto where you can actually, and probably shouldn't tell people this cause they'll abuse it, but inside of Ableton, the only time you'll ever actually clip anything is on your master output.
So you can have like all your tracks, even your your devices like on your master chain just in the red on all those little meters in between the devices and nothing will actually clip you can just have a single utility at the end of your master chain that turns the whole volume back down and you're good to go. Obviously for certain things like a distortion if you drive a distortion it's gonna distort more so certain like level dependent effects it's gonna make a difference.
So there's not like really any I guess any actual practical need these days to do that. But I guess I kind of got my start making music because I studied sound engineering and we worked on a lot of like analog consoles. It was kind of, I mean, even when I was studying, we used like digital hard drive recorders. So was like kind of this sort of interesting transition point between digital and analog.
Yeah, they're kind of the worst of both worlds because they're I did the Alesis HD 24, which I loved at the time, yeah. Yeah. The editing is crazy. used to see you only had like a digital clock, like an alarm clock really. And you could do copy paste cuts and things, punches and stuff. So sometimes I would figure out like, how many seconds is my song if it's at, you know, 120 BPM or something, what's four bars. And I have these notebooks filled with calculations.
I always had like a calculator with me, but at the time it was like, I made a loop out of this drum part and fixed that part that I messed up on. And it was amazing, but it was also just so tedious. And when I saw my friends using Pro Tools, was like, There's a grid like this is crazy yeah, I definitely don't miss those those days too much.
But so yeah, so I kind of almost have a bit of an old school, what I guess what you'd call an old school approach to mixing where I generally sort of always try and keep a bunch of headroom. Also, on an actual practical note, what I find at least when I'm mixing is I always generally set my volume faders on my tracks to somewhere between like minus 12 and minus six. not so much for headroom, but more for actual like headroom on the fader itself.
Because if I'm mixing and I'm something like, oh, I want the drums to be a bit louder, but actually now the drums are at like plus 60 dB on the mixer, then I've got like 10 everything else down and then turn the drums up. So more from that point of view is I always just like to leave myself room on the actual fader itself to be able to turn it up if I need to.
But again, like I could really probably just stick utility on it and turn it up get the same sort of thing but just for the sort of style of mixing that I have I find that quite useful. Well, also for the minimal approach you have, because that's exactly what I wind up doing. I need more than plus six, the utility comes out, or maybe even something with a little color, some kind of distortion or compressor or something. But that's probably the smarter way is to just start lower.
I've found when I do that stuff, I get further. you know, without having to reach for plugins and stuff. with my band's record, I made it a point to, I mixed in mono first, wanted to try that like for real and also paid a lot of attention to the headroom stuff and I managed to get it sounding pretty good. And then when I started doing the stuff I would normally be doing along the way, it was like, wow.
You know, and then you turn off mono and you can move things around and you're man, is, like now I can really do this not out of necessity, but out of like choice. I wanna spread things out, not because like I can't hear this unless I move it over there. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I've definitely done that before as well, the kind of mixing in mono thing and then suddenly, even to the point where like I'll do kind of almost imagined panning, I'll say like, you can't hear it when you're panning in mono, but kind of think, where do want this to sit? And you get to the end and you turn off your mono switch and it's like, whoa, you're all mixed.
sounds, maybe it doesn't sound better, but maybe other people who listen to it think, this is, they don't notice the difference, but because you've got it relative to the mono version. I guess you're like going through the, when you're doing it the way I tend to do it, which is just kind of mixing as you go. You're, you're always trying to make everything sound great right away. And I guess that can be inspiring and fun, but when you save it for the end, you get all of that at once.
And it's like, whoa, here we go. It's discipline, I guess. yeah, because I know I also do the kind of mix as you go thing, but often, and I think I did for a number of tracks on the album is kind of go back and not everything, but like reset a lot of things, reset levels, reset pans, and then go in and do like you would kind of do an old school mix where you've just got all these sort of channels that are all at unity gain and then play around with it from there.
And it just gives you a nice fresh perspective on... because you've been listening to the mix in a particular way up until that point and you just suddenly kind of get to hear it in a fresh way and try new things even, try panning things in different places, something more or less loud. Yeah, it just gives you a different perspective on something that you've probably been listening to for several hundred hours by that point. Yeah, that's true.
Well, I've run into the trap where I try to make everything sound like full, like I'm mixing the drums and I want it to take up everything and be in a really exciting sounding drum kit. And it's like, well, now you have no room for anything else. Then I got to change things to like bring in the bass. And then I want that to sound like really cool, you know, at every stage.
And you wind up having to dial it back, but sometimes all that work you did trying to get everything to sound cool and full and loud or whatever, like it becomes really daunting to undo all of that. Cause I got like seven different effects on each one of these drums. Like I can't delete that. It's going to totally change everything. So it almost gets you stuck in these like predicaments where you, you have nowhere to go.
Yeah, I mean, the beautiful thing about working in a digital environment is you can just do a save as, which I do often, I do kind of, well not often, I always do before I do the kind of mix reset. So I know I can go back and I'm like, actually, I think I kind of prefer it before I can go back. But then the interesting thing about that is a lot of the time I'll go back and say, no, I've done a good job. I think it sounds better where I've ended up now than where it was before kind of thing.
Yeah, so always make sure to do the save as thing. And of course, the beautiful thing with Ableton specifically, I'm sure you can probably do this in other DAWs, but if you've got different versions of a project, you can open it up and drag in individual tracks or even individual device chains from old projects. I know I've done that a couple of times. like, I'm pretty sure I preferred how I had effects on the drums in my previous version.
I'll just go back and just grab that track and drag it in and there it is. You can kind of almost have the best of both worlds nowadays because it's also flexible. Yeah, I did that to have continuity too. cause we recorded all our drums at the same time, pretty much. And then we kind of did everything one at a time. So if I had a sound I liked on a track that tended to be what I used throughout, cause it was already there and I wanted the songs to sound the same, not be so drastically different.
And plus it's a lot faster. Yeah. Yeah. I think also to a degree though, there's like a difference. And I always like to think about what's the difference between a creative effect and a mix effect. Cause like an EQ is a good example of one that could be both. Cause you could use an EQ to really tonally alter a sound in a way that is creative versus just fitting it in with a mix. Whereas something like a distortion is probably more of a creative effect and like that.
that's when you're writing you're adding that you're really dialing in your tone so usually like when I'm going through and like kind of leveling everything out to do a mix most of the creative effects I'll try and sort of discern like what's a creative effect what's actually an inherent part of the sound here leave those on and then things like EQs compresses kind of remove all those and then kind of come back and do a mix so yeah right. That's a good way to think about it too.
And EQ is a good example. And a lot of times I'll have more than one EQ, maybe one in the beginning and then one a little later just for that reason. once, first one is to like get the garbage out, the stuff I don't need. And then after whatever fun I've had in between, sometimes you need to tame it a little and then you can play around again. Yeah. were very conservative from what I saw in your device use. It seemed like, you know, it wasn't these long chains that you could scroll through.
It was tidy, very deliberate. And I think your record as a whole, it has a lot of clarity and it sounds, you unified, but everything has its own place. Everything really is identifiable. I really enjoyed what you were doing with shakers. It's like a kind of a weird thing to bring up this like a feature, but you seemed like you have like a bunch of different kinds of shaker sounds and they're, really helping a lot with rhythm and texture, especially texturally, I guess is what I'm talking about.
Like I really enjoyed the way you did that. Like there were a lot of times when the shakers came in and it's just like, yeah. that just filled things in nicely. I'm really glad that you picked up on that because that is very much the intention. So I'm glad to hear that it's working. It's always nice when you kind of are working on a piece of music and you have a particular intention and you never know whether it's going to translate to sort of how people hear it.
But that, yeah, I'm really glad you picked up on the shakers because that was quite a, it's quite a big sort of part of, at some point I've kind of definitely defined. Because I'm a drummer is my background, which I'm sure we've discussed before. tend to sort of lean pretty heavily on percussion and rhythm as the kind of main guiding elements of a lot of what I am, music that I make.
so particularly like shakers and tambourines are just, I don't think I've ever made a track that doesn't have a shaker or a tambourine somewhere in there. Cause I just find them so useful for one, for adding groove to things. Cause I think it's a really they kind of almost, depending on how you use them, become this little consistent kind of rhythm that then the other drums kind of feed off and bounce off to create a particular groove.
But then as you said, like also just functioning as a kind of a textural element that can fill out the mix in those sort of higher areas. I particularly love tambourines. don't know why I just really like the sound of a good tambourine.
Yeah, just kind There's something about like the way a tambourine works and the way a tambourine gets played that it's got, because if if anyone's, I'm sure everyone's sort of familiar and seen tambourines being played, they obviously have that natural back and forth motion, which is kind of, you kind of can't not swing a tambourine. You got to like really try hard to not swing a tambourine. So it just always adds a good like amount of groove. I mean, shakers as well.
got that sort of back and forth shaker motion. it's really not hard. It's really hard to not groove. with a shaker or a tambourine. Yeah, they do. help kind of, you know, the last size. It's not a word, is it? But I kind of like take, yeah, the push and pull, yeah. Rubber band -ness of the groove. They're to play too. I mean, they're really hard to play, I think, as like a not drummer percussion person. is one of those things that I do often find when like I've done.
Well, I discovered it for myself being a drummer. The first time I ever like played quote unquote, played percussion in a band as opposed to drums. I was like, this is going to be easy. I'm a drummer. And then I sat down. was like, wait, this is, this is different to drumming. There's something very different going on here. And I kind of gained this admiration for percussionists.
I would be always just sort of saw them as these kind of lesser drummers, but actually there it's a whole different thing. And then you see it as well when like I'm at a gig if I'm playing a tambourine and somebody's like, I'll just come play the tambourine, you know, it's pretty easy and then they come up on stage and then they're like, wow, this is not as easy as I thought it was.
Yeah. Especially because the tambourine, I've joked with friends while we're recording, you don't even have to hit the record button and it still makes it on the track because it just cuts through everything. Yeah, I always joke that the tambourine is the loudest thing known to man. It's pretty loud. hear it from the stage, like without any kind of microphone.
I have some recordings of an old band playing and somebody like was passing around tambourines in the audience or whatever and it just ruined it. It's like they're so loud and then, you know, they're hard to play. It's not like the people think like that because they're like school toy instruments almost, Like if you're wrong, it can ruin everything. I mean, think it goes again, like I now have the utmost respect for percussionists.
think all percussion instruments, people sort of think like even something like a conga drum, you just sort of see, it's two hands, you you just kind of hit this thing. But there's a whole technique to like how you use your fingers and the rhythm of it and where you play on the drum that yeah, just has a whole kind of the level to Yeah, and even just how much it hurts after a while.
You need to really toughen your hands up for Well, I played just a couple of weeks ago, was a family's 70th birthday and I kind of got requisitioned to be in the band, but there was no drum kit available. So I was put on the cajon and I mean, it can also, yeah, you sit on and you kind of drum with your hands. Again, another example of a percussion instrument that looks really easy to play, but is actually quite complex. But yeah, yeah, exactly. a box.
But I mean, you hit that with the palm of your hands. And unfortunately, we were in like a small room and all the electric instruments, which don't have to worry about feedback or anything, were cranked really loud, but the cajon, because it's mic'd, you obviously got to worry about feedback. So I could only turn it up so loud. And I had my brother out in the audience kind of saying, this needs to go up, this needs to go down. And they were like, we can't hear the cajon at all.
And I was like, it's feeding back. can only play louder. My hands were like sore for about a week after that. that gig because I was just hitting this con so I believe it. I've jumped on the congas for like a track and my hands are like pink, you know? Look like I have sunburn or something on my palms. It's, yeah, it's lot of respect to percussionists and they add so much groove when they're good.
Yeah. But so, uh, circling all the way back to the tambourines and shakers, um, most, actually all of, yeah, pretty much all of the, the percussion on the album, I'd wanted to, when I was working on the album, wanted to re -record it at some point, but actually they just all ended up being samples. Um, so I never got around to kind of recording it live, but a lot of them are like samples that I've recorded, myself.
have a pack that I put out, think it's one of my oldest packs called Shake, which is just like a bunch of tambourine and shaker loops. There's a bunch of those in there. But yeah, yeah, that's that's packs been. Yeah, that packs been serving me for years. But yeah, I always want to try and record like percussion stuff live if I can, but just kind of never got around to it for this this album. So but they all that kind of worked as they were. Yeah, they add a lot of groove to everything.
You know, it's like electronic music, but it has a lot of organic vibe to it. Which I think is a really hard thing to pull off. Even when I'm playing my guitar, say, over something that has electronic elements, I find the blending very challenging. Because for a whole variety of reasons, like the timing is never quite perfect, the tuning is never quite perfect. But there's something really nice about that, never quite perfect though.
And I think I know with a lot of my own music, I'm kind of with all the electronic elements, I'm sort of always chasing that never quite perfect. always adding a bit of detuning somewhere to the synths or doing something to the sort of rhythmic parts or playing them in by hand or something that it's not quite perfect that I think hopefully adds to that sort of organic sound that you mentioned.
Or like using field recordings as rhythmic parts that are going to just have an inherent rhythm to them that's not going to be quite perfect. And so sonically also this kind of organic elements, but then also musically in terms of the rhythm and the tuning of things, it just feels a bit more, more natural.
And I think it's one of those things that, I mean, I know for myself, even having made it when I listened back to it, I don't hear that, that everything's out of, not out of tune, but like kind of slightly off a little but you just kind of feel it more than anything, I think, is the idea. And I think it adds, or I hope it adds something to the music. Definitely, because everything can be so perfectly in tune and quantized and everything. And it's just not natural. So injecting that in.
And for me with, if I'm playing guitar, I find it much better to try to ruin the rest of the music, not ruin, but you know, like imperfect it, know, de -perfect -ize it. I need to read a dictionary or something. to just bring it down to earth a little bit so that it fits with those other instruments rather than trying to fix the guitars or trying to fix the other stuff to meet the perfection of the digital stuff.
Yeah, they need an unquantized button in... well, humanize, I guess, is the feature. humanize in Live 12 is, that's like my favorite knob. It's so helpful. Just, used to do it with grooves. I used to use the random slider and grooves and put those on clips, but now humanize is just great. Oh yeah, and now, well now in 12 .1 we've got permanent grooves as well.
Well not permanent grooves, like, I don't know how much digging you've done into what's new in Live 12 .1, but the like default groove thing is quite cool. I haven't played with that because my default set didn't have a groove, so it's not in there. So I don't have it. So I need to maybe just get rid of that and then just see how that works a little more, that it applies it. yeah, it's interesting. Because that global groove knob, I almost had no use for that ever, Just because.
what like the groove on individual grooves themselves. Yeah, right. And then if I was putting that groove on a few different elements, that little slider affected it all. But well, the only time I ever used the global groove was for the arpeggiator. Because strangely, the arpeggiator swing mode is either like full kind of triplet. But if you dial down that global, then it starts going back to being straight. When you get to zero, then the swing is straight.
Yeah. So I, yeah, I kind of, my, my journey with groove was I always started with, grooves the way you do where it was like individual dialing in the kind of amount on individual grooves and never touching the global groove until that point when I discovered the, the arpeggiator swing and that it links to the global groove. And then I kind of made a concerted effort at that point where I was like, actually just, even if I'm not using the arpeggiator in a set.
just using the global groove to adjust how much groove just with the potential of like, well, maybe I'll add an arpeggiator and then I don't have to like kind of go back. And now I've kind of switched my workflow around that I do use the global groove. So if I do end up using an arpeggiator and want to swing it a bit, it kind of locks in with everything else. So that was kind of a little workflow switch that now is gonna be even more useful with the default grooves.
Yeah, that's cool because you kind of had to do one or the other in the past. Cause when you bring down the global groove, then it brings down all those grooves, but the arpeggiator sort of meets it there. I would never really do them both at the same time. It was kind of one or the other for that reason. But now maybe, but there's some X for live arpeggios that have a groove. Like you would expect at a swing knob.
Yeah. But yeah, I've been having a lot of fun with 12 .1, especially on push, like the standalone push that you can get your macro variations. I mean, that was just a killer for me that you couldn't get them. So I got so into it, you know, with live 11, just making like a single rack that I can have like all of these sounds in. And then it was like, oh, I don't have it anymore. It was so disappointing.
And yeah, for me, the big one is the macro randomization because I use that all the time for creative stuff. So being able to do that from push now is pretty cool. Mm -hmm. Yeah. And I love the way the auto shift works, the auto tune inside of Live. think sometimes things, I guess, like certain features that people have wanted for a long time, took a long time to get to Live. People are like, why is this taking so long? Like comping was a good example, take lanes.
But the way they did it was great. And I think the same thing with this auto tune device is it's fun, it's playable. you can put MIDI into it. I'm really excited about Yeah, I think it's a super fun device. I used to use, and I'm sure a lot of people, other people who've used the little altar boy effect by Soundtoys for doing like, cause a lot of the music that I make ends up having like vocal samples in it. And there's this one sort of technique that I like to use.
If you've got like a, let's say you've got like a chopped up vocal loop. that's maybe a bar or two bars long, can very quickly get kind of boring tonally. So what I always used to do is just chuck the little altar boy on there and then automate the the format and control just to move kind of slowly up and down. So just shifts to sort of very subtly tonally, but it kind of adds some variation. And I'm always looking for ways to get rid of plugins and use more native devices.
So sorry, sound toys, but not going to be not going to be using little altar boy anymore because you can do that in auto shift now, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, I used to do the same thing with Nectar by Isotope. But they used to have a mixing and a, I forget what it's called, mixing and maybe live or something like that mode where, kind of like, like AutoShift has the live button. So like there's no latency. So I could use it live and I always loved dropping the form.
It's more subtle like this when I was saying, you you got that like kind of deep voice thing, but, After Nectar 2, I couldn't really do it anymore. I of lost that effect live at least. But now it's back and you could have a lot of fun with that. Like you said, automating LFOs on it or maybe using the envelope follower to change it based on... I I haven't even tried this stuff, but it's just so exciting.
Yeah. Yeah, it kind of feels like this release is maybe what they wanted 12 to be, if I had to guess. I've seen that comment on all the videos and on Reddit and everyone's like, oh, this is what 12 should have been. And I think everyone kind of sort of knows that, yeah, this is kind of what they wanted to have in 12, but maybe it just wasn't all ready in time. Yeah, maybe.
It's kind of nice to digest some of the other stuff first, though, to get used to like the MIDI tools and the scale awareness stuff. And then, OK, now you can have it with audio. Yeah. Like even if this hadn't come out for a while, there was enough in 12 that it felt like a substantial update. Well, I felt that way. I know there were a lot of people that thought, okay, maybe it's a bit lacking in terms of a major update.
But that definitely has been something I've seen a lot in all the comments is everyone who wasn't upgrading to 12 because they thought, oh, that's not enough. They were all like, okay, cool. Now, now I'm going to upgrade. Because now there's just so much cool new stuff. Yeah, I think if you were a live user from like older versions, there was a lot to take in. The browser for me was the biggest hurdle.
Still learning that a bit, but they seem to have made some nice changes that in the new version 12 .1, I mean, especially just like grouping your plugins by manufacturer was, that was the nightmare. I was like, man, I don't know where anything is anymore. You definitely weren't alone in that. Yeah, but now it's like, okay, I'm starting to see it. I gotta see how that works on push, but...
Yeah, the auto tagging samples is a really big one for me because I kind of was using a lot of the features in the new browser, but I just hadn't sat down to like put in the time to go in and tag all my own samples. I'm like, Oh, am I really going to do this? And just haven't gotten around to it. But now with the auto tag, just, and it's so far in the sort of testing and 12 .1, it's been pretty good.
The samples that are tagged as auto tagged as kick drums are all kick drums and it's working pretty well, which is really cool. Yeah, I had a to -do list. I keep always the to -do list. And one of the items was like tag devices and samples. And every time I look at that, was like, I don't want to do that. So I'm so glad I didn't, because that would have been quite a project. But now it's kind of there for you, which is very helpful.
So I know we're approaching the end of our time here, but we were kind of saying earlier, this is like a period of reevaluation. This is before we started talking, think, or recording. What's that looking like for you? I mean, cause You've been very active over the years, constantly creating stuff. If people recognize your voice from Ableton's official videos and tutorials, that's because it's you. And you've definitely kept very active.
What are you thinking about these days as far as moving forward? Gosh, so I mean, let's skip back an hour and start with that question, because I could talk about that for an hour. There's a lot of stuff that I've been kind of thinking about recently in terms of the sort of music tech space. And just kind of, think, the world in general is in an interesting place, technology -wise.
And I've been feeling a lot kind of, probably for a number of years, just personally, like there's kind of enough stuff. in the music tech world, at least. There's obviously some very interesting stuff happening with AI tools at the moment, which, I mean, people have pretty strong opinions about those, but I think, I mean, there's been sort of AI -based tools in music for a while, but there's a lot of kind of new stuff coming out, which I think has got lots of interesting creative potential.
But beyond that, it's like, well, here's another compressor and here's another delay effect that does X, Y, Z. so somebody who makes tools. It's been quite a challenge for me recently because I've been thinking about like what what is missing. I don't feel like I need to kind of make anything new because it all kind of exists already and all the ideas have been done.
But that sort of leads me down to the path to things like the essentials pack where it's like, okay, well, these things exist, but how can I kind of make them better or improve their workflow or think about them in a different kind of more creative way, which is its own sort of challenge.
So that's something I've been very much sort of thinking about a lot recently is, what sort of tools and things can I make or do I need that are going to take the things that are, that already exist and the sounds and tools that already exist, but maybe refine them in different and interesting ways. And there's a bit of a sort of a head shift going on there.
but also in terms of just content that's out there as someone who's creating content for YouTube and I've sort of always historically been quite slow at putting out videos I think the most productive I've ever been is maybe like five or six videos in a year kind of thing and probably on average more like one or two but now sort of thinking about the kinds of content that I want to make and kinds of tutorials and things I want to make is you can go on YouTube and you can find a video about
Absolutely everything. I mean just talking about live 12 .1 A couple days afterwards out there were 10s 20 30 different videos about Everything that's new in 12 .1.
So I'm thinking a lot recently about How can can these things how what can I do to kind of contribute to all this without just adding more noise And that's still like a very much a kind of a journey in progress and that I'm figuring But there's gonna be a lot of shifts for me in the next couple months of how I approach content and the kind of content I put out. I haven't quite landed on exactly what that'll be yet, but yeah, it's all mulling over at the moment. It's a sort of mind stew.
Yeah, it's a good point because you're right, there's no shortage of this like devices, compressors, EQs and all that. There's no shortage of kind of like news reporting on what's going on in the world of music technology. And I agree with you, like the essentials thing is kind of nice. It's fun to have something that just gets to the point, you know, to streamline the workflow. I've been enjoying that kind of stuff a lot. Stuff that just gets me to being creative faster.
Yeah, well, that's also the other thing that, and I think the album was very much a part of that is I got into this because I want to make music. And I think all of us who are in this space, we want to make music, but it's quite easy. Specifically, like when you are working in music tech or teaching things, it's very easy to get distracted by the technology itself and the technology becomes the focus, which I think is important in many ways because the sort of technology enables us.
I want to try and focus a lot more on the music and what is going to help me make more music, finish more music, me and the sort of people that I work with and how is the stuff that I create going to actively help people make more music instead of sit around tweaking knobs and making lots of weird and wonderful sounds, but never actually kind of finishing anything or making any music.
So both for me personally, I want to spend a lot more time actually making music and then trying to help other people make more music as opposed to just buying more plugins and never doing anything with them. Sometimes I feel like I should change like my bios to like talk about making music. I talk about making music. thought somebody commented on one of my videos like last week or something like you talk too much. How about you make some music?
And I was like, I know that's the hard part though. It's like being a carpenter and just like checking out hammers all day. I call it, look at this hammer. It's weighted differently and it's got gold plating or something. I mean, there is something really cool about that. I also, as much as I got into this to make music, also love the technology side of things. And I'm really interested in different tools. mean, like talking about something like Auto Shift, it's nothing new.
Auto Tune has been around for ages. All those things have really existed, but having it as a little device inside of Ableton is really, really, I'm super excited about it. It's going to be a fun kind of device.
And the... of aesthetic of things as well also helps you be creative in different ways and so like from the device side thinking about that kind of stuff and trying to sort of strike a balance between being really interested in the technology and being passionate about the technology but not letting it kind of consume the music side is the balance to try and
find so because they both have their because a gold -plated hammer sounds pretty cool as a carpenter that sounds like a pretty fun thing to have But, yeah. Exactly, exactly. yeah, I'm excited about these new features and stuff because it makes me think about what I can make with it. But since every single day, there's something else coming out. You can get caught up in the like, wow, I could do with that thing.
And, and if I had that, like you can just, I I've been trying to reduce my, incoming stream, like of like stuff I follow and yeah. Just so like I'm not constantly just, you know, my music time isn't finding out what new things I can make music with are. And like, I don't need to know every single new release.
I don't need to know that there's a new plugin or there's a new synth or... I like to know that stuff, but yeah, sometimes you can just, the consumption part becomes the whole thing after a while. Yeah. Yeah. you on that. Make some music. Make more music. yeah. Well, you just did an album, so that's pretty awesome. Congrats on that. that for a long time and finally motivated myself to get it done. So I think part of that to sort of neatly tie everything into a little, a little bow.
I think what, what ended up really kind of working for me for the album was after many, many years of trying is kind of finally striking that balance that I was talking about between the technology and the creativity. there was a point before I started the album. where I sort of sat down and I went through all the tools that I had, all the plugins I had, all the devices enabled in sample packs. Like literally it was like a period of about two months where I didn't make any music.
just went through everything that I had and said, do I need this? No uninstalled that plugin, delete that sample pack. I need this. Cool. I'm going to keep that. So at the end of that two month period, when I sat down and was like, now I'm going to make music. It's not, I'm not sitting down and saying, well, I've got 5 million kick drums, which kick drum I'm going to use. It's like, no, I've got five kick drums.
I know which kick drum I'm going to use because it's one of these five or shaker sample or instrument or synth or whatever it was. Um, and, uh, yeah, and that was, that was really useful to actually just being able to finish stuff. Um, and there were points where like I was working on the album was like, Oh, if I just used like XYZ synth, I could maybe get the sound had to be sort of quite intentional of like stopping myself and saying, no, this is, this is what I set out with.
And I'm to stick to this and ending up maybe, I think what can be quite easy when you have all these tools available to you as you think, I'm just going to use this like synth and load up a preset and make a sound. And you get something that's kind of interesting versus what happened with the album is the synth that my synth of choice was a wavetable, Ableton's wavetable.
And so by using that, it's like, well, Maybe I've got the sound in my head that I could load up a particular synth and create it with, but actually how can I make this with wavetable, make something similar? I mean wavetable is not the greatest example because it's a pretty diverse synth, you can create a lot with it. But just that little limitation helps to focus everything and also then kind of quieted that noise of, well I need this synth or I need this effect to be able to finish stuff.
No, I don't. I've got it all here. And I decided that already before I started. I knew that this was all I needed. And so I know that's what I'm going to stick to. And then the Essentials pack kind of ties into that because in this process of going through and selecting all the bits that I wanted to work with, there were a couple little gaps of things that I thought I haven't quite found in all these tools I've been through, I haven't quite found the thing that does exactly that.
And so the Essentials kind of came about. by filling in those gaps of like, I just really wanted a simple drum tuning device and outcomes shifter kind of thing. But yeah, that sort of process of being really deliberate and enjoying the technology, going and spending time with it, spending time. Like I think I spent probably a week where every day, actually it was probably more than a week, probably a full month, where every day I was like, today is the distortion day.
I'm gonna learn everything I can about distortion. I'm gonna read up on tubes, I'm gonna read up on tape, I'm gonna read up on whatever and go really deep on distortion instead of like spending a bunch of time with a whole bunch of different plugins and not really kind of grasping the depth of them there. There's also that sort of bit of going deeper with things. Yeah, that then sort of enabled all the creativity. It's great idea.
I fantasize about that sometimes of going in, deleting things, but I wonder if maybe someone will just have to throw my computer in the ocean. I'll have to just start fresh on a new computer, you know? My, my, my computer actually died two weeks ago. something happened to my hard drive must've gotten corrupted. Fortunately, I managed to get the, the guy was able to reformat the hard drive and get it back up, but everything was wiped.
So I had to, I had backups of like important stuff, but I had to reinstall everything. And it was really nice. Cause it's like, I, I kind of already knew what I wanted to keep. Cause I'd done the process before, but I got to do a little reevaluation of like actually what plugins am I going to install? am I? So I can highly recommend. getting your computer to crash. Just stomp on your hard drive or something and start fresh.
Yeah, guess if, I mean, that's like a worst nightmare type of thing, but if it happens, that's the silver lining is that you can reconstruct. have used the collections though. Sometimes I'll use one and I'll just tag things like for say like a project. It's like, this is sort of my palette. And then I can just click on the collections and there are the drum sounds, there are the synths, there are the, and that helps. it's with, it's without the, commitment of saying goodbye to a lot of stuff.
But it's smart to limit yourself like the real trick, I think is the commitment. Cause even like you can always reinstall plugins. So once I've uninstalled everything, it's like, but I can really use that synth install it. No, don't do that. And you got to just kind of, yeah. Be really disciplined about sticking to the rules and things that you set for yourself in the beginning. Yep, I think that's where our creativity lives is in those limitations and finding solutions to those problems.
I only got five kicks, so what are we gonna do? Maybe I'll put my essentials distortion that effect on there to get that extra growl instead of searching through the samples. Yeah, it makes you think in different ways when you have to work within those limitations. Very good. I'm excited to see what you come up with and where this leads you, because I'm sure it'll be cool. And maybe I'll see that exciting warble FX added to the essentials. It's definitely not going to go on the list of to -do's.
Nice. So we should direct people to your main site, is elephant .io, but there is only one E and no A. So E -L -P -H -N -T. Yep, just remove the vowels, essentially. So E -L -F, I'm sorry, not F. E -L -P -H -N -T .io. it's console, console, console .co with. word console just twice with actual Ls. Unfortunately, console .co was taken, so I had to do it twice, but... No, that would not work for the URL, Yeah, I love the album. I had an especially nice experience listening to it last night.
I wasn't going to sleep yet, but I just wanted to recharge for a little bit and just put that on and took me into another world and felt rejuvenated and continued the night. I think it's great. It's a lot of cool stuff.
great production of course and if you want to check it out people you can download the sessions and see what's going on in there and that's that's like a master class in itself right there and just composition and seeing how things get done the elephant way to add by the way, that part of putting out those sessions was so that people could dive in and see how they're made, but also so people can pull them apart and use them for their own music.
anyone who downloads that is welcome to do what you want with it. Do a remix, use some of the loops, synth sounds, just pull stuff out of there. One of the fun things with Ableton is you can just go in and grab a synth preset and save it into your library Use it somewhere, so. Yeah. That's a good idea. I'll probably be doing that myself. So I have more choices. Yeah, sorry about that. I I know I'm a hypocrite. I talk about limitations. And I'm like, I got a new pack, everybody. well. It's fun.
Yeah. So cool, man. Tom, thanks so much. We'll send people to your sites, in the show notes, anything else before we wrap don't think so. Nothing that comes to mind other than just, thanks for having me. It's always fun to chat. sorry I've got to rush off because I'm sure you could probably keep chatting for another hour. we can always do it again. Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure. So thank you and thank you everyone for listening. Thanks everybody. Alrighty.