ableton sound engine and new monolake album

[nopattern]

I saw something interesting after Henke added me to his personal page on facebook. This has nothing to do with my personal opinion but i thought it was interesting.

I know he used to post alot on this site when people complained endlessly about the sound coming from the ableton master bus and asking if they needed to mix their tracks in another program to get a better result... usually he would come back with some generalized and not to the point answer about it trying to speak cleverly around the issue. most of the time the answer would lead the reader to think it's not necessary.

there are pictures on his facebook page during production of the album Ghosts where you can clearly see a multitrack mixdown done on protools HD with an ICON console. so basically he's doing exactly what he told thousands of users they didn't need to do...

interesting

[regretfullySaid]

Is it fair to determine that he isn't mixing in Live specifically because of that?

[jer_mcclain]

is this really still an issue? here is the link to the pic for those that want to get in on this latest drama:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hp ... 2326_n.jpg

that does look like a killer listening setup. and the new Monolake sounds great also.

[Angstrom]

Odd that you mention these posts of his, because I think you are wrong. 180 degrees.
Here is a post where he basically says ProtoolsHD was designed for this job for 20 years, the workflow is great, it's no accident that people use pro set ups worth thousands and designed by experts.

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 6#p1295066

I would phrase the question differently:

Why on earth would people spend a significant amount of money on a Digidesign ICON console or something similar, and what have the 100+ developers who are working on ProTools since 20 years done wrong if the product would not do the main job it is designed for better than Live?

And better means: workflow optimized for handling the task of editing and mixing. The difference is not the sound of the engine, its the workflow. And as far as analog consoles are concerned, of course it adds color if you pipe the stems from a DAW thru a nicely designed console. And of course it helps making great mixes if you have nice smooth physical faders.

But there is another correlation: People who can afford those things also have fantastic sounding rooms. If they would mix straight in Live in such rooms their products would still sound better than what people do in their bedrooms. And if the people with these rooms and their PT HD rigs have all that stuff, of course they prefer to mix with their consoles than with the mouse or midi faders in Live.

Robert

[steko]

The album was composed, edited and recorded entirely in Ableton Live and the synthetic sounds are the results of tweaking the Operator, Simpler, Sampler and Live's audio effects, my Max4Live synthesizer 'Granulator', a bit of convolution reverb and a lot of Live's own reverb. An important role in the sound design also played the creative usage of Live's various time stretch algorithms. The 'Tension' synthesizer's physical model of a violin string bombarded with rapid parameter changes sent from a Max patch is responsible for the odd sounds on 'Phenomenon'. Other important contributions to my sonic universe come from my collection of vintage hardware synthesizers: Resonant timbres of a Sequential Circuits Prophet VS on 'Afterglow', bell-like sounds of a NED Synclavier II on 'Foreign Object', various timbres from a Yamaha DX-27 piped through an Alesis Quadraverb and a Lexicon PCM-80 reverb, pads from a Oberheim Xpander and more I forgot about. Very essential for my creative process and for the incredible fun whilst working on this album were my newly acquired Strauss SE NF-3 studio monitors. One of my best purchases ever. The entire album was recorded in 96kHz and only the final master files were down-sampled to 44.1k for the CD / mp3 releases.

Ghosts' has been mastered in December 2011 at Idee und Klang in Basel by Daniel Dettwiler. Playing back the individual songs directly from my original sessions in Live at his room equipped with Strauss SE MF-2 speakers and state of the art DA converters allowed me to control the spatial placement and to apply final corrections of timbres in each track in more detail than I ever dreamed of. Transfer to vinyl by Lupo / Dubplates&Mastering, Berlin.

*http://www.monolake.de/releases/ml-026.html

http://www.ideeundklang.com/en/studio/mix.php

[noland]

Nuff said. And just for the record: Dubplates & Mastering use Protools for processing digital stems. It's about the workflow.

[Tarekith]

Those Straus MF-2 monitors are just.... beautiful.

Some day....some day...

[kanuck]

yeah, i feel like the pro tools setup was used just for the mastering. There's nothing wrong with hiding the fact that Robert was not only using ableton live but to outright lie on his site seems unorthodox.

[cacti]

Here's a thought. Perhaps he didn't mix the album, but rather someone else who is more comfortable using pro tools.

[Angstrom]

Here's a thought. Perhaps he didn't mix the album, but rather someone else who is more comfortable using pro tools.

He made all the sounds and recorded it in Live, then he took it to Basel and he and Daniel Dettwiler mixed and mastered it on other equipment. That's how I'm reading it anyway.

The album was composed, edited and recorded entirely in Ableton Live

Note it doesn't say "composed, edited, recorded ... and mixed". It says it was mixed on their system, which is one of those big old integrated HD thangs.

Those suites are built around the dude in the captains chair and their experience using the system. You render all the channels out and load them into their protools so they can tweak 'em, just like everyone else.
if any of us had access to a fine fine ProtoolsHD setup I'm pretty sure that every single one of us would mix in that too!

Me, I just don't have the hundreds of thousands of pounds lying around.

[mihai]

why does it matter that much? would you stop listening to his records and/or consider him worse at his craft because he's not using live anymore? what if after all these years we find that hendrix used a b.c. rich draco to record his stuff instead of the strat?

personally the only selling point of live for me was that i felt the most comfortable in it from the creative and technical side, not because all of these artists were using it. couldn't care less.

[monolake]

I saw something interesting after Henke added me to his personal page on facebook. This has nothing to do with my personal opinion but i thought it was interesting.

I know he used to post alot on this site when people complained endlessly about the sound coming from the ableton master bus and asking if they needed to mix their tracks in another program to get a better result... usually he would come back with some generalized and not to the point answer about it trying to speak cleverly around the issue. most of the time the answer would lead the reader to think it's not necessary.

there are pictures on his facebook page during production of the album Ghosts where you can clearly see a multitrack mixdown done on protools HD with an ICON console. so basically he's doing exactly what he told thousands of users they didn't need to do...

interesting

Dude, read what I wrote here: http://www.monolake.de/releases/ml-026.html.
The album has been produced *entirely* in Live. The Icon is not located in my little room, but in the mastering studio in Basel. And it was *not' used for anything apart from routing.


And btw.: the entire production of the album was 96k /24 bit and we played back all tracks in the mastering studio straight out of Live from my laptop into a Metric Halo interface and from there digitally into his PT HD system.

Best, Robert

[monolake]

also, here is a photo that shows the scenario: All tracks of the album playing back as mixed down stereo fliles with each song in one track for possible overlaps between the tracks. and the mastering in protools with the stereo files. mastering took less than two days and was mainly making small adjustments to glue the tracks well together.

But yeah, if you think Live sounds like shit, feel free to spend more time and money for more gear !!! I will continue to make music with it in the meantime.

Robert

[The Carpet Cleaner]

Boom chakalaka !!!

[julienb]

stupid thread.