![]() ![]() It helps to get more sounds out of Amp and Cabinet, bringing the kind of extreme saturation made famous by a long list of guitarists, dating back to the 60s, topped by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Pedal “Completes the circle” of devices for guitars in Live. So what do the new effects sound like? What makes them special, and how can you make music with them? The devices’ creators gave us some tips, and came up with some audio examples to demonstrate them. It makes sounds the way I like them!” Using the devices It’s easier to reflect someone’s personality. “I think it’s nice when something like this is built by a small team. ![]() Fortunately I have team members with a deeper understanding of intricate DSP matters than me.”įor Marc, working in such small teams can help a device inherit real character and uniqueness. I usually end up with code that has 'spirit' but doesn't behave very elegantly – I often make mistakes. I’m just trying to discover things that sound cool rather than making sure I’m doing it the best way. Working on Drum Buss, Marc shared this preoccupation with sound, and reliance on the rest of the team: “I have a very experimental approach to things. ![]() So that makes for some interesting discussions.” If something is technically crappy but still sounds great, to me that’s wonderful! But not for an engineer… you still have to make it usable. An engineer might not have the same vision, but a better technical perspective. Coming from a musician's background, I had a clear idea of what I wanted things to sound like. “But what I found interesting about the process for Echo is the different perspectives. “Typically there’s one lead person who has an idea or vision, then a few others doing development and design”, says Christian. Though the teams behind the three effects were small, they nonetheless fostered divergent points of view. Then we recorded a whole bunch of old delay and echo units – like the Roland Space Echo, WEM Copicat and Morley Oil Can – and asked ourselves, What gives them their character? What are the quirks and imperfections that make them interesting, and how might we go about recreating these?” Precise effects have their own charm, but Live’s new ones mean you create more sounds that just don’t sound like computer music.” Inspiration over emulationĬhristian led the research into the world of classic hardware delay units that guided Echo’s initial design.“We made a kind of playlist of songs with delay sounds we found interesting ones that would have been hard to achieve with what we had in Live. And delays in themselves are so powerful. A lot of effects are based on them: flanger, chorus, even reverb to a degree.” Christian saw a chance to create new effects that would broaden Live’s palette: “They distort sound in a way that is usually only known in analog gear. “Our existing delay effects are quite clinical – we wanted something that could drift a little more. “We felt a slight dissatisfaction that we didn’t have any modulated delays in Live” reveals the Sound Team’s Christian Kleine. The origins of Echo, Live’s third new audio effect, were a little more predetermined. The early form of the device we saw at a Sprint was so convincing that everyone quickly got behind the idea.” “With Pedal, there wasn’t a formal decision by a project owner to develop it. “People are encouraged to explore whatever they want,” says device designer Matt Jackson, who had a hand in the production of Drum Buss, Wavetable (Live 10’s new synth), and Pedal – a device that took off from the same hack platform. Sparks and sprintsįollowing its unforseen invention, an early version of the Drum Buss device was soon on show at one of the development team’s regular hack sprints – a kind of internal show-and-tell used for Live experiments – where it picked up admiration from fellow engineers. They also passed on some insider’s tips on how to use the effects in your music. But surely serendipity isn’t the only force behind Live’s new creative tools? Asked to tell us more, the Live development team let us in on the inspiration and perspiration behind three characterful new audio effects for Live. The happy accident that led to the Drum Buss prototype sounds a lot like the kind of creative spark that leads to a new track. I was pretty sure it was something worth exploring.” I was just messing about with it and inverted the filter from high to low pass – it suddenly started booming in a really satisfying way. “I had this code for a filter that I’d been playing with for a while I really liked the way it sounded. “It was kind of a fluke” admits software developer, Marc Résibois, about the conception of Live 10’s new Drum Buss device. ![]()
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