Adobe Audition: Abletons match made in heaven

Hello Folks!

Seeing as I always have some spare time at work to fiddle around with, I thought I would make somewhat productive use of this time and start a blog about various issues I am faced with as a young, delusional, yet hopeful Musician and Songwriter. So on with it I guess.........

ADOBE AUDITION

For the previous 5 years of my recording experience I have always used Adobe Audition for home recording of rock songs, ambient songs etc. Adobe Audition is excellent in this case. While the user interface is somewhat intimidating, once one gets comfortable with the environment, the software becomes remarkably intuitive and sits just right for those looking to do multi track recording digitally. I personally find it much better then Pro Tools who's popularity can only really account for market saturation. Pro Tools is still very good, but not deserved of its throne by any means. That is besides the point though.

In my main and current project, "Twilight Nation," me and my musical cohort Max are making extensive use of Electronic Rhythms and Textures. Now before I even started fooling around with electronic music, I was purely using Adobe Audition for recording. After spending a lot of time listening to the likes of Gui Barrato, Deadmau5, The Orb, and of course Daft Punk, I started to piece together in my head how these guys we're constructing and playing their work, along with much online research. I ended up coming the sad disillusion that these guys had many different ways they we're doing it. The only thing notably similar was they we're all somehow using Ableton. Albeit, I did not have access to this software quite yet, so I made a few attempts at electronic music using purely Adobe Audition. While I could if I had wanted to, play through my cheesy toy keyboard at the time to produce a lot of the textures and melodys, the sound was lacking due to its old duo phonic synth module. I was also finding that a lot of melodic structures (even with the good electronic artists are often stupidly simple) where played almost inhumanly on beat and all the rhythmic structures where tightly on point. So I then came to the conclusion that there must have been a more mechanical way in which this music was coming together.

So my first attempt was basically a sound chunk collage. I made the basic beat pattern by sampling individual kick and snare hits from an old drum machine I had. I took the individual drum hits and cut and paste them in to the the typical dance pattern of a kick on every down beat, and the snare on every 2 and 4 beat of the measure and let that run on for about few mins. Keep in mind I'm using audition's bars and beats time line to line everything up exactly on beat. The next part was even more difficult. I knew I wanted a fat bass line but I new for one that my bass was out of commission, and two there was no way my toy keyboard at the time was going to get the sound I needed. So I instead opted to constructing my own bass line by sampling one deep bass note from a bass track my friend had recorded for another song I did a while back. Then to to make a melodic line, I copied the one bass hit waveform a few times and using audition's waveform editor I was able to make the first hit a root E note, the second at 5 half steps, and a few others that are in the same E7 key. I looped that over the drum pattern I had made, and the result was a very striking and exciting sound. I continued to follow the same techniques when producing the rest of the instruments, and after about 5 hours of arduous programming, I had myself my first electronic track which to say was less than mediocre would be too generous, haha.

Finally after a few months of doing that way, I was eventually able to get my hands on a copy of Ableton Live from and unnamed source. When I first fired it up I immediately felt at home as a musician. Because the UI was incredibly inviting and easy to use, and the fact that it had excellent software synths I knew that this was the ideal way to incorporate electronic music in to my projects. The only things I didn't like about it was that:

1) While in Ableton, elastically streching waveforms is really easy, ableton sucks at concrete waveform editing.

2) Sound quality sucks in general when editing and stretching waveforms.

So in the end I have found that Ableton and Audition are one powerful combination as they both make up for what the other one lacks. Next posting will be about final mixing techniques. To be continued..........