TSRB Podcast 079

[00:00:00] Malcom: If you are one of those types of folks that writes music on your own, this could potentially be a way to speed up your workflow a lot, which is amazing because anything that speeds up the workflow and just makes getting ideas down quicker, it's going to lead to creativity. 

[00:00:15] Benedikt: This is the self recording band podcast.

The show where we help you make exciting records on your own. Wherever you are, DIY stuff. Let's go.

Hello and welcome. Recording band podcast. I am your host then at the time. And I'm here with my friend and cohost Malcolm Owen flood. How are you? 

[00:00:38] Malcom: Hello? I'm great, man. I got new gear, new plugins, I should say. So 

[00:00:43] Benedikt: how did you, okay, so you don't know this guys, but we record two episodes in a row today. So we just did one.

It was an hour long. We got into all sorts of rabbit holes and stuff. We've been talking about. How did you not mention that? How did I bring the past hour? [00:01:00] 

[00:01:01] Malcom: I knew we had to, so I needed to save something and I was holding back and I kind of got me cause we talked about, uh, that Trump forge plugin, we both picked up.

Um, so I got to mention that, but I got two others that I'm just loving. I got this a blue face. Puddle kind of thing. Uh, like everybody knows what the blue face fuzz pedal thing is. I think, uh, you know, like that big blue circular pedal, that's a, it's a classic. Um, but audio, audio, audio. Oh man. Oh, audio warranty, audio warranty.

I remember when I saw their name, I was like, that's a tricky one for a Canadian guy like me. Um, but there are a company called audio already and they have that fuzz pedal and they also have an Echoplex. Uh, we never heard of those. Okay. I got them off. Um, which, uh, uh, sorry. What's Cole's first name? Uh, is his last name, even Cole?

You mean? What do you mean? The producer YouTube [00:02:00] or that you've you've you actually know, um, you you've met him. Oh, man. Sorry guys. I'll you 

[00:02:06] Benedikt: mean? Nah, you mean cooler? 

[00:02:07] Malcom: Cooler. Oh man. Okay. Canadian portrait, 

[00:02:10] Benedikt: Christian cooler. Yeah. Shout out to cool. It, uh, he, he posted a field eventually. Well, we might, I don't, I don't know what we might eventually partner up with him because he has some really cool things going on with his call it audio cuts and stuff like that.

And we will, at some point recommend that to you because he's really awesome. Yeah. 

[00:02:31] Malcom: Definitely. I've never gotten to meet him. Obviously couldn't even say his last name properly, but his channel is fantastic. And, uh, he had a video about vocal distortion, which was a topic I was researching at the time and he got me on that.

Fuzz pedal and then this Echoplex, which is an amazing delay in itself, but it's actually a great distortion plugin as well. And I'm always on the hunt for saturation distortion stuff. As you will know, if you listen to our episode 76 about distortion or saturation. 

[00:02:59] Benedikt: Yeah, [00:03:00] totally. I just, I'm just on their website.

I haven't heard about this company, but they have great stuff, man. 

[00:03:04] Malcom: It's really good. Yeah. Yeah. The quality is high too. Like using the actual tools and stuff, they. Why haven't 

[00:03:11] Benedikt: I heard about this, they have a tape echo thing. They have the tube screamer. They even have the shitty boss pedals, like the heavy metal.

Yeah. That's

[00:03:24] Malcom: worth checking out. Uh, I, I I've been liking it so much that I thought it deserved a shot. 

[00:03:29] Benedikt: Totally. Oh, I have to dive in to like, that's you shouldn't have told me about that because all of their plugins are like 15 bucks, 20 bucks. There's already, I can see already so many that I want to try that I probably end up buying 10 or so.

And then 

[00:03:44] Malcom: yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was like, I watched one YouTube video and then I woke up and I had already bought two plugins. 

[00:03:52] Benedikt: did call it, recommend the plugins or like the real. Oh, the plugins. Yep. Oh really? Exact Buggins. Yep. Okay. So I see the blue [00:04:00] face. What was the other one? 

[00:04:01] Malcom: Uh, the it's the Echoplex, which is, uh, called 

[00:04:05] Benedikt: the plexus, the plexi tape.

Yeah, 

[00:04:08] Malcom: it's really good. I know that the Echoplex and echo boy, which is the sound noise delay that everybody uses all the time is great as well, but this is much more realistic. Um, I I've gotten to use a real Echoplex before and this thing is much more like that. 

[00:04:23] Benedikt: Awesome. Really, really cool. All right. 

[00:04:28] Malcom: We just cost all of our listeners 50 bucks or so 

[00:04:33] Benedikt: I need you to open it like a Patrion just for, to compensate for it.

Like the things I have to buy it through this cop five. Yes.

You guys have to pay, essentially. That means you as the listeners have to pay. For my, um, lack of discipline when not compels me about plugins. 

[00:04:51] Malcom: I know it's so bad. Like I have so many plugins and I needed, I just couldn't find a vocal distortion that did what I wanted. And then I bought [00:05:00] two didn't need both.

I could've just tried one for a trial and then it would have done the job. 

[00:05:05] Benedikt: Yeah. So that means you use the plexi tape as a distortion, uh, more than, uh, the, uh, the tape. Yes. 

[00:05:11] Malcom: Yeah. Like three times since then, actually I should also say interestingly that I was using both of these for vocal distortion. Cool.

Um, since then that, uh, that fuzz face the blue, the blue one, it has been, uh, used on distorting, snare drums, all sorts of stuff. Bass. It's just great. You're going to love it, man. I know. That you'd like to source and as much as I do, you're going to be stoked. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We should actually talk about our episode though.

Cause I know that you're in a rush today. You got to get out of 

[00:05:41] Benedikt: here. Absolutely. So this episode is going to be a quick one. Uh, but not because I'm in a rush. Um, that's part of it, but the main reason is that it's a topic that is, I think, can be covered pretty quickly, but it's still cool and important to talk about.

And that is. Um, audio to middy [00:06:00] because that is something, especially home I'm recording. Uh, people will have to deal with a lot once they start, like when you can't at one point or another, you will come across this. You will need to know what this, what this is and how to use it. It's so handy. If you, if you get the concept, um, what that means is you record something and an actual audio file or signal, and then you find that.

Either not usable or, um, it's maybe good enough, but it needs some enhancement and you can't do that with the Q a compression or whatever. So you want to add something to it or like, yeah, the classic example would be drum enhancement, rum, simple enhancement, but it has more use cases than that. So basically you take an audio recording, you convert it to many notes and with those mini notes, you can trigger whatever you want and blend it in with the audio or replace the audio entitled.

Right. And that can be a lifesaver that, especially in home recording [00:07:00] situations, maybe you you've been in a, in a less than ideal room and the track is just not usable, but you still want to, um, do you want to use that performance and, or, you know, your drums, as I said, the performance was maybe great, but the close mates just don't cut through.

So you need to add samples, but you want to keep some of the original, like, there are so many use cases for it. And we're going to walk you through how to actually do that and give you some practical examples of like use cases for this stuff. 

[00:07:30] Malcom: This is, uh, for ProTools users, which I understand we were behind the curve on this.

This was a very new feature. I think in like the last 12 months it got added. Um, and it felt like magic. So essentially all I do is I've got my, uh, I'll use a snare drum. In this example, I've got my snare drum audio track from recorded drum kit, and then I've got a mini instrument track under it. And I just grabbed that audio file, drag it onto the instrument track.

And then all of a sudden it detects what's in there and spits up media information that matches it. Or actually, you know, [00:08:00] instead of it's snare drum, that's use a bass guitar drag, the bass guitar onto an instrument track. It spits out media information that matches the hits of the bass guitar, but also the notes.

So it's tracking the pitch and the timing of it and trying to recreate it with me. And that, and that, that opens up this like a whole world of opportunities. It's magic, but it's also probably not as powerful as you think it's kind of both. Um, yeah, so that's what it is. Um, and then we've just got like different examples of what we use it for personally in our own experience.

Um, and I'm sure there's more than what we do, uh, but everybody's kinda got their own thing. And as mixers, it's gonna. Some important things for us, but for people that are composing more than any, or I do, it probably has whole ton of other uses as well. 

[00:08:46] Benedikt: Absolutely agreed. So I have basically three situations and two of them are the most common ones, um, that I, where I use this.

So the most common one is obviously from sample replacement or enhancement. So. [00:09:00] We use like Thomas, the same person, awesome human being who like added this, this podcast. Uh, he also does like mixed prep for me and drum editing and the way he does it is, and or we do it. Yeah. Um, we use the tracker in superior drummer, even if we don't use superior drummer for the drum samples, but we compared a couple of different tools and we compared it to the native, uh, Cubase functionality.

And we found that the tracker in superior drummer had like detected the velocities, um, the, just the correct way. And it always was like, the phase is perfect. The velocities are almost perfect. And it's just, it's incredible what this thing can do because it also. Uh, it, it can tell the snare from the bleed, which is pretty insane because it's the only tool that does it actually, where if you have a very, very quiet snail part, for example, but the high heads are still going and the high hat might be louder in the snare mic.

In this part, then the actual ghost notes on the snare. For example, it's [00:10:00] still detects those ghost notes and ignores the high hat, which almost other tools don't do. Or if. Aloud Tom, Phil is ignored and the quiet ghost notes, right. It are tracked. And I don't know how they do it, but it's awesome. And so Thomas does it with that.

Um, you can do it in Cubase. You can do it in pro tools. There's different ways of doing it. Basically the software detects the transients, like the attack of the signal, and then. Um, on every transient, it puts a mini note. And if it also detects, if it can also detect the velocity, that's even better, that means it can detect how hard the drum was hit.

And then you get a mini file that gives that. Yeah. That gives you the dynamics. The. Um, basically more or less like these tools are not a hundred percent accurate, but more or less something you'd have to do. You go, you have to go in manually and adjusted a little bit, but at least you have like quiet notes will be quiet.

Mini notes and hard hits will be loud. MIDI notes, right? 

[00:10:59] Malcom: Yeah. [00:11:00] Yeah. I'd say that drums are probably the most commonly audio to MIDI. Replaced situation, um, or augmented situation. Uh, would you agree with 

[00:11:09] Benedikt: that? Yeah, totally. Yeah, because I absolutely because like we do it that way because it gives me more opportunity to use different samples so I can use those mini notes to feed trigger.

The most commonly used triggering plugin. You can feed that with audio as well, but. To do it with me because I have more control over it. Right. Um, so I sent the mini notes into that, or I can use a contact drum instrument or any other sampler, like Medi just opens up the opportunity to use whatever I want for drum sample.

And that I have ultimate control over it because every sampler reacts differently. And sometimes I need to adjust the velocity based on that. Some samplers are very dynamic or others, not so much. And like so many is better for me than just putting the, the, the, the, the trigger plugin on the actual audio track.

Right. But w the reason I bring this up is because few questions. I'd say that rums [00:12:00] are absolutely the most common thing for this, because even if you put a trigger plugin or back in the day was run Magog or anything like that on the actual audio track internally, I still, I think it still converts the incoming audio to a mini note and that triggers the sample.

So, yeah. It's always audit too many involved. So drums samples are absolutely the most common use case yet. 

[00:12:23] Malcom: Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't. I made that example of dragging the snare onto an instrument tracking protocols. I use a different tool called massive DRT to do what you do with superior drummer and also accurate.

Super yeah. I actually do generate audio blips instead of mini notes, just because pro tools really sucks with me. Um, and, uh, so it just saves me a headache of things going wrong. Um, but then, yeah, like you said, now I've got this little clean blips that are phase aligned and takes way too long to do and yada, yada, but now it's perfect.

And, uh, and I can manipulate them without, you know, if I need to turn up some notes to make [00:13:00] the sampler hit harder. I can do that and it's not going to bring up the bleed and stuff like that. So same idea, just a different approach. Um, and it is, like you said, in the end, still internally audio timidity. Um, and in this case we're using it to augment or replace drum sounds.

Um, my second biggest usage would be replacing bass guitars. Yeah. Same for 

[00:13:24] Benedikt: you. That was what I wanted to say. Yep. Yep. 

[00:13:26] Malcom: It can just be the biggest lifesaver in the world. Um, it, uh, basis, usually one instrument or like one note at a time, um, in rock music, it's often not doing any kind of like flavor, pull, bend stuff, you know, uh, it's very tight and, you know, to a kick drum and it's also not very, it focus.

It kind of is like a reinforcing instrument a lot of the time. So when you replace it with a middy bass, It often sounds just as human. Um, if mixed. Well, I would say 

[00:13:59] Benedikt: I [00:14:00] agree. I, I have to say though that I don't use it often enough, even, probably because I'm a little hesitant and sometimes. Or actually always, um, whenever I have an out of tune base or any situation where this would be the right thing to do, like the, the two comments and areas are an out of tune bass that I can't completely fix, or, um, a base recorded with very old strings, for example, that I can't do anything about those are the two common scenarios.

And in those cases, if that happens, I always try to go back to the band and ask for a new track, if at all possible, like I would prefer that. If that is not possible, I'll try all sorts of tricks to make it work. And if, if it, like, if, if it's the only choice I'll replace it. But yeah, I talking about this, I realize I should do it more often because it leads to better results.

And I dunno why I'm hesitant about it. I, uh, because as you said, I know that it sounds natural and every time I do it, I don't regret it. It's actually really a lifesaver. Yeah. 

[00:14:56] Malcom: Sounds great. There, uh, the advantages for people wondering is that. [00:15:00] Unreal sounding a lot of work goes into sampling these instruments.

Uh, and then the, the biggest thing is that they're just perfectly tuned. So you, your, your low end is so solid. Um, and the dynamics can be incredibly solid to, um, to track a base as well. Contact instruments put out would just take days, I think, to pull off days and multiple sets. Yeah, exactly. Now of course there's examples where it doesn't work.

You know, I haven't found a plugin. That's going to do a slap apart or I haven't even found a plugin that would do for you. Style. Well, um, it's kind of like specific to driving parts, you know, um, like punk and rock bass and heavier, but I'm sure there's ways around that. Uh, and the same with you. It's kind of, even though it always seems to work, it's kind of a last resort.

I always try and mix the base. I try and tune it. I spent way too much time trying to fix up this crappy base. And then eventually, sometimes I'm just like, okay, we're going to then bring in middy and see if that solves it. [00:16:00] And, uh, often it does. Um, but you know, sometimes we get that the, the real base there as well.

I actually, I would say most of the time we get the real base there, um, to the point we want. Yeah. But it's worth knowing it exists. Um, it's worth knowing that you can write with. Totally it's worth knowing that if you don't have a nice space or can't make a bass sound good. Well, recording, you should just try programming it from the get-go and you're going to be so stoked.

[00:16:25] Benedikt: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I was about to say that the ample ample sound basis can do fingerstyle pretty well. I'd love to ride 

[00:16:33] Malcom: Miller with our company. Not familiar. No. 

[00:16:36] Benedikt: Oh, okay. Like if you go to ample sound, a M P L E, they have great acoustics as well. They even have banjos and ukulele and all these. Um, we are Chinese instruments and stuff, different, all sorts of different acoustic guitars, electric guitars, different bases.

And they all sound really good. Some better, some, not so much, but most of them really, really good. And, um, [00:17:00] and it, it let's say it depends mostly on how you program them as always, but if done right, they sound incredible. And the, the audio examples they have on their website and like, if they are very well programmed, but they sound insane.

Um, the basis were finger style. And so I know that. 

[00:17:17] Malcom: Cool. Cool. I, uh, I will have to check them out. I recommend a company called submission audio. I think they just do really fantastic sampling, but they are all pretty heavy sounding. Um, which is something I'm prone to like about bass guitars, but, but there's a time and place for everything, uh, to track the same copy that makes superior drummer has easy base to, I think it is called now, or maybe it's just easy based one.

I'm not sure, but it's, it's quite good. Um, interestingly, the audio Dimity tracking on that. Is better than the audio to MITIE tracking inside of pro tools. So it'll do a better job at matching the parts. Um, and actually we should mention that when you do this, we drag like the bass guitar on do an instrument, track it, converts it to Medi it's not going to be perfect at all.

There's going to be a bunch of [00:18:00] screw ups and you'll have to go through and manually fix it all. Um, which is one reason I avoid doing it all the time is because it, it takes a lot of time to, to write to the part. And Dimity even with this. 

[00:18:11] Benedikt: Yep. Yep, totally. Um, there's always manual work and wealth, but it's worth it.

And so, um, yeah, but base replacement is, is one application, but also, and that's, I use that more often than actually replacing the base, but that requires a very well tuned, um, original base that is, I like to add an additional layer of sub base. For example, below the actual base tracks I create. And I essentially double the, the base track with just sometimes just a sine wave.

Like just the, the pure notes. Sometimes it's some instrument, but whenever a bass lacks weight, depending on how they track it, like, I, I got a track, um, just a couple of weeks ago to mix. They used a very, very small bass amp and they didn't give me the I and the character [00:19:00] sounded cool. The mid-range sounded cool, but there was just no way to it.

No low ant they make to the small, tiny amp. And it was like if they had high passed it at a hundred or so. So there was no, no, yeah, no, wait, no foundation. Um, so what I did was usually I'd grabbed the Dai for that, but it didn't have it. So what I did was I did. Created the ma the Medi like the audit committee, what we'd just set.

And then I put that through a synth, um, and added the low end that was missing. And I kept the mid-range character. And now it's just sounds like the same base with low end. 

[00:19:32] Malcom: There you go. Yeah. That's that's awesome. And yeah, that's something I've done before and I used to just have to manually write it in, but now you just like drag it in their audio committee and it's so much closer.

It just saves time is what's going on. Um, I've also done things like grabbing even that, that basic and dragging it down, it generates a copy, pitch it up a few octaves, throw an octagon, or like a sort of an octagon or. Uh, on, and now you've got a starting point for [00:20:00] this whole nother instrument that didn't exist before.

That is really one of the coolest things, but our unanimity, and it's not something that I use very much as a mixer because I'm not usually adding entire instruments to an arrangement. Um, but it, uh, it's something that I could see composers using all the time where maybe they don't have a violin or can't play violin like 99.9% of people.

So they can just write it in and you could probably sing it in, I don't know. Audio Dimity and then have us like a starting point for a violin track, which is amazing. Cool. The 

[00:20:27] Benedikt: ability to sing it in. Um, if you have an idea for, for some sort of melody, some sort of lick or whatever you want to put in there, um, to just sing it in and then choose the instrument that you want to add, create audit committee, and then trigger that instrument.

That is so powerful. Um, it's insane because it's think about it. It does. It means you don't have to be able to play this instrument, but you can still have it in the arrangement. You don't even have to be able to play. The piano like you would, when you would like play it with a mini keyboard, you would just have to sing it, capture the Medi, um, adjusting [00:21:00] manually.

You would have to understand the piano roll at least. And like some basics, like music theory, but you don't have to actually be able to play the piano in order to do that. You just have to sing the melody, create the Medi, adjust a couple of notes and put the instrument on. Then you want to add that is so powerful.

Um, and then there is about vocals. There is one cool thing I just recently tried and I have to dive deeper into this because it was really fun. Um, slate, digital put out. Um, they, they did it for a while. Now. They, every once in a while, they, they give you a free, if you're an all access pass member, I think it's called like their subscription model for the plugin.

If you're a member there, um, they give you every couple of weeks or months, they give you a free sample pack basically. And these are huge sample libraries, like gigabytes of samples, all sorts of things. Like one, one was an 8 0 8 sub-base pack. One was, um, all sorts of different things. And one of those packs that they gave away this year, Um, vocal samples, [00:22:00] it's just individual, um, oohs and AHS and like different, they, yeah.

Vocal, filtered things that you could, it's mainly for electronic music, but it's just different vocal samples basically that you can play with your piano and create like backing vocals or effects or stuff like that. And. It's really, really cool to create like fake harmonies or choirs. Like you can create entire acquires or backing vocals that have never been there with these samples.

That actually sound pretty realistic. And even like creating a fake double with that's just subtle, not a double, but like, like a backing vocal. That's just mixed in very, very quietly with the main vocal. And it's not an artificial, like a fake double. But it's actually a different voice because he used one of those samples and then you mix it in with the lead vocal that can lead to very interesting effects.

And I played around with it a little bit and I find it pretty. Pretty exciting. Like you can do a lot with [00:23:00] that and, uh, yeah, you can grab the lead vocal melody or a harmony. If it, if it already exists, um, grab the middy and then use it to trigger these vocal samples. And then you can create a quiet, like acquire or some ambient vocal thing in the background that has never been part of the arrangement without having to sing it.

This 

[00:23:19] Malcom: sounds totally interesting to me. I'm very curious. 

[00:23:22] Benedikt: I've never with vocal samples a lot. That is something like in the electronic music world. They do that a lot. I've never really done it, but when I had to look at the sample pack and listened to the individual samples, I was like, I need to use that more because you can do really cool things.

Awesome. Awesome. I'll have to check that out. Yeah. So yeah, there's that, um, creative use cases, um, are those basically like the sky's the limit, you can do whatever you want. And the concept is always the same. You analyze the audio, um, generate money, sent the money to a sampler and trigger whatever sample you want.

Yep. If your dad doesn't have that functionality, [00:24:00] but you want to still do that, there is ways to do it. And one way, and I think one of the most popular ways is to use them to use something like Melodyne, that's basically also the way Cubase does it. They have this built in thing that's similar to melody.

Um, like, I don't know if the cheap or the affordable versions of Melodyne can already do that. I'm not sure about that, but what Melodyne does is it lets you, it analyzes the audio. It shows you the notes of whatever you put in a bass or a vocal, and then you can tune the audio and correct it. That's how pitch correction works.

But there's this additional feature where you can, from those notes that Melodyne detected and once you've corrected it, You can turn those into MIDI notes and Meldon then spits out a MIDI file that you can use to trigger other stuff. That's the same. Thing's true for Cubase, you analyze the audio. You can then either tune it or create a melody from audio.

So if your daughter doesn't do that, Consider getting [00:25:00] Melodyne or, or something similar. I don't know if audit Joon can do that as well, but I, I assume that most modern pitch correction programs will do 

[00:25:07] Malcom: probably. Yeah. Yeah. And like we said, we got different ones we use for drums instead. You're kind of figuring out what your use cases, I think before you 

[00:25:16] Benedikt: buy one.

Totally. Now I I'm, uh, one more thing because I read it in our notes. You wrote about vocoders? Um, a vocoder is a thing like you should explain that because, okay. I know what it is, but that's one of those effects that I think are pretty cool, but I rarely use it and I never really got the concept behind it.

It's one of those things that I need to look into more, but every time someone does it, well, I think it sounds pretty cool. So maybe, yeah. 

[00:25:44] Malcom: Yeah, I think I used one once. So this is probably going to be 50% wrong. But, uh, I think the concept is that your tuning plugin is kind of set to what you play on a, say a mini keyboard, um, and that inputs to your [00:26:00] voter.

And so you sing while you play this chord and it pitches your voice to match the chords you're playing. Um, so it's gonna be like, choose any of the notes that you're holding kind of thing. Um, I don't know if it goes to whatever's closest or, or how that works, but in theory, you don't actually have to be playing the piano.

You could just write in that mini information and have it stuck there so that your voice has to follow whatever you've programmed instead of playing live. Um, so you could grab the piano, you've recorded, dragged onto a mini track, and then use that as the vocoder impact. As you check your vocals. Yep.

Okay. All right. Hopefully that's 25%, right? Yeah. 

[00:26:39] Benedikt: Now. Okay. So you would grab the vocal melody and then do the vocoder. Yeah. And then do the Volcker afterwards with that many information. 

[00:26:47] Malcom: I think you would grab another instrument. I think it's conforming your voice to another instrument. Uh, so you, you grab middy information from like a piano and.

Is affecting the tuning plugin on your voice [00:27:00] or the vocoder plugin on your voice. 

[00:27:02] Benedikt: Ah, okay. That's why I was confused because it says grab vocal melody data, but you don't, 

[00:27:08] Malcom: those are for private. 

[00:27:11] Benedikt: No, I will. Uh, so you will, uh, you will grab, I thought, yeah, I thought about it the wrong way. So you grabbed the metal.

From a different instrument and apply it to the vocal and I was reading . Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. That makes 

[00:27:25] Malcom: sense. I think you could use that for just both tuning, but also for the SIG vocoder effect, which is like very synthesized sounding. Yep. Yeah. And I think actually, maybe I'm wrong here, but I think it's like some folk coders, even like, if you play a C major chord or something, you would have those three notes that your voice would be reproduced all three times.

So you'd be playing that your, your voice would sound as a chord, not just the, one of the notes. 

[00:27:49] Benedikt: Yeah, you're right. You're right. There's often a fifth in there and it sounded, yeah, totally. Yeah. Cool. All right. Um, I think that's basically basically it, because everything else would be, [00:28:00] um, yeah, we would be repeating ourselves.

That's that's what it does. You have an audio, uh, event and audio recording. You turn it into media and then you can do whatever you want with it. 

[00:28:10] Malcom: Yeah. It's just a feature worth. Knowing if you are one of those types of folks that writes music on your own, just like a lot of like in the, in the box instruments and stuff, this could potentially be a way to speed up your workflow.

A lot, which is amazing because anything that speeds up the workflow I'm just makes getting ideas down quicker is going to lead to sustained creativity. 

[00:28:29] Benedikt: Absolutely. Um, one thing I want to add, if you're using Cubase, they have this awesome thing. I don't know if there's a similar thing in pro tools. They have this awesome thing.

They call a sampler track. You can drag, you can grab any audio event in your session. Any audio snippet, long or short doesn't matter, you can drag it onto the sample track and then it will automatically spread it out over the keyboard. And then you can play, um, whatever you drag in there on a MIDI keyboard.

So you [00:29:00] can have one individual note of some instrument or one hit from a drum or one vocal syllable or whatever, and you drag it on the sample track. And when you do that, Two seconds later, you can play that sound on the keyboard and it automatically is, has the right pitch on every key. And that opens up such cool creative possibilities, and then you can manipulate the sound.

So that's also in the background, they do audio to MITIE and then spread it out over the keyboard. And I don't know how it exactly works, but it's a very cool thing to play around. 

[00:29:27] Malcom: That is actually something that I have no idea how to do in pro tools. And I would love to figure it out. It'd be like, I could see that being really fun, even just like having different, uh, like, uh, a snare sample and being able to pitch, shift it around.

[00:29:40] Benedikt: Really cool. I mean, with that thing, you can grab a Tom that has a long sustained note ragged on the sample track, and then you can play a melody with that. Tom sound, you know, Yeah, or you can, any, any words somebody said you can, you have on your own immediate keyboard then, and you can, you can play with that and like anything, uh, it's really [00:30:00] super cool because you can create, you can instantly create your own unique instrument that you can play with whatever you drag onto that.

Yeah. I know 

[00:30:07] Malcom: there's, um, like electronic producers that listen to this podcast and they're all just laughing at us right now. That is how we do it. And we're like, oh, have you heard about this new thing? Yeah, totally, totally rock guys. Totally. 

[00:30:21] Benedikt: Especially if you're using Ableton, you like, uh, this episode is probably enough for you.

[00:30:28] Malcom: Yeah. It's really funny to think about. 

[00:30:30] Benedikt: Yeah, exactly. But for us, it's a big deal because I mean, Cubase does sort of does it all a little bit, but still like Ableton is the way to go. If you were electronic to make electronic music and want to do those things, um, a lot, but for us, it's, it's actually a big deal and pro tools, especially, but yes, but on the other hand, principles is a great, it's a great offer, other things.

So there's that totally, 

[00:30:54] Malcom: totally. All right. Keep it up. Yeah. Thank you for listening again. 

[00:30:59] Benedikt: Yeah. [00:31:00] Thank you. If you want to teach us how to really, um, work with middy, if you're one of those people in, in, in Ableton or whatever, or if you have other use cases or even more creative things and stuff that we can't even imagine what you can do with mini, let us know, like post in the community or, um, re shoot us an email or whatever, like educate us because I think that beyond those.

Replacement or augmenting scenarios that we've been talking about. We don't do very much with many, like, because we run the rock world, you know, but we're always curious to learn more. Of course. So if you make electronic music and you are more advanced teachers, 

[00:31:42] Malcom: definitely, definitely. Just so we don't get like 1400 emails about this.

We did leave out key spikes for gating and stuff like that on purpose. Like we've covered that in a lot of episodes. 

[00:31:54] Benedikt: Exactly, exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, yeah, it would be cool by the way before we wrap up, it [00:32:00] wouldn't be cool if we had, maybe there is in our community, um, And an expert on all things, middy and electronic music stuff, because I think it will be a cool idea to maybe do a guest episode or some, I don't know, maybe some, some sort of piece of content with someone who knows what they're talking about when it comes to media and electronic music, just for those folks in our audience.

So if you are that person and feel like you can teach people about that, maybe we should have an expert on that stuff on the show. 

[00:32:31] Malcom: Told them told him. All right, let's wrap it up until next 

[00:32:34] Benedikt: week. Thanks again for listening. Bye .