Ableton Forum

Don't mean to be offensive, but being from the old school, I like to just hit the nail on the head.

Been finding it hard to find any threads that are directly related to the captioned sub-forum.
This category should be split up into at least 10 sub-forums.

I use Live for studio work. Would love to see more threads about Music and Audio Production.

Would love to share ideas on topics like Room treatment & Equalization, metering etc, etc. These are subjective topics. Would be good to hear more about stuff like these being discussed here.

So, guess I will have to start one of these threads myself.

Yes, this kind of has become a "general" forum about technical help and rants about the software, as well as general inquiries.

IF you want to discuss some of the inner workings of the software there is "tips and tricks" subforum.

For other topics related with gear, room treatment and mixing you can check other forums as Gearslutz (they have a dedicated subforum to acoustic treatment) and KVRaudio (they have lots of dedicated subforums).

Yeah, this forum is more or less anything related to making music or Live in a very general sense. Having a ton of sub forums just means a lot of stuff gets ignored or missed in my experience. Even with just the few forums categories we have now, moving something to where we think it might be more appropriate eventually pisses someone off

But definitely start some topics on your own if there's things you want to talk about that no one else seems to, would love to get some fresh discussions going!

I with that Ableton would make a Forum directly targeted to Ableton Live community help

Well, the peeps that know me here will know that I tend to come up with some seemingly absurd observations and arguments.
There are so many things I can think of to start an argument, but just off the bat:

Say, I have a room and none of it's individual dimensions is bigger than 18 ft. and by my reckoning, a 60Hz wave would have a bandwidth of approximately 18 ft. Therefore, why am I able to perceive a bass tone of 60Hz in this room when the wave would not have been able to complete one cycle within the room? It seems to me that a 60Hz tone generated under the conditions mentioned above would be perceived as distortion.

You don’t need to experience an entire cycle of a wave to hear it.

Tarekith wrote:You don’t need to experience an entire cycle of a wave to hear it.

Accepted, But hear it as what? And I suggested that we hear it as distortion or only in terms of the other sinusoidals that make it up. Because within that room it would not have completed a full cycle, so it must be unidentifiable.

As I write this reply, it occurred to me that we may not hear the actual 60Hz wave but its harmonics and other partials that make up the overall tone but not the actual 60Hz. Because IMO, it seems that technically it cannot exist in that space.

Which leads me to an offshoot of this: In a room smaller than the one in the OP, would it be practical to use a subwoofer? Would there be any usable signal to monitor at that frequency and below?

evon wrote:Which leads me to an offshoot of this: In a room smaller than the one in the OP, would it be practical to use a subwoofer? Would there be any usable signal to monitor at that frequency and below?

Well you can use it, but the problem is if the overall sound of the place (the interaction between the speakers output and the room acoustics) will be adequate for your purpose, if you are listening for fun it might be but if you want to properly mix it might not be good at all.

login wrote:Yes, this kind of has become a "general" forum about technical help and rants about the software, as well as general inquiries.

IF you want to discuss some of the inner workings of the software there is "tips and tricks" subforum.

For other topics related with gear, room treatment and mixing you can check other forums as Gearslutz (they have a dedicated subforum to acoustic treatment) and KVRaudio (they have lots of dedicated subforums).

Before Ableton recategorized this forum, there was a General forum. This has taken it's place.

kb420 wrote:

login wrote:Yes, this kind of has become a "general" forum about technical help and rants about the software, as well as general inquiries.

IF you want to discuss some of the inner workings of the software there is "tips and tricks" subforum.

For other topics related with gear, room treatment and mixing you can check other forums as Gearslutz (they have a dedicated subforum to acoustic treatment) and KVRaudio (they have lots of dedicated subforums).

Before Ableton recategorized this forum, there was a General forum. This has taken it's place.

And it was glorious. Alas, time slowly marches forward, leaving in its wake the tattered remains of all.

login wrote: you can check other forums as Gearslutz (they have a dedicated subforum to acoustic treatment) and KVRaudio (they have lots of dedicated subforums).

And then come back to Live forum. I like it here, wish I didn't have to leave. Why couldn't we have a dedicated subforum like the rest? That's my point.

evon wrote:Say, I have a room and none of it's individual dimensions is bigger than 18 ft. and by my reckoning, a 60Hz wave would have a bandwidth of approximately 18 ft. Therefore, why am I able to perceive a bass tone of 60Hz in this room when the wave would not have been able to complete one cycle within the room? It seems to me that a 60Hz tone generated under the conditions mentioned above would be perceived as distortion.

It is an interesting question!

After pondering it for a bit, however, I have come to the conclusion that the room has nothing to do with what direct frequencies we can hear. The only thing the room limits is the standing wave frequencies occurring as a result of the room size.

If you really think about it, you don't need to be a certain distance away from the speaker to hear a certain frequency - i.e. you don't need to be 18ft away from the speaker to hear a 60hz note or hold your headphones that distance from your ears (otherwise we wouldn't hear a lot more frequencies on headphones)

This is because our ears don't wait until a full wave forms, then stuff that chunk of air into the ear canal and start analyzing it. lol. Our ears actually scan the sound as it passes us, in real time, reading the entire wave or enough information to determine the wave size.

As an analogy, think of the difference between a flatbed scanner and a sheetfed scanner (one that passes the paper through). Pictures below. The first scanner has to be at minimum the length of the paper it scans - the second one doesn't care how long the paper is because it scans the paper as it is fed through (like our ears).





In addition, it might help to think of a sound wave for what it really is when it travels through gasses. A longitudinal pressure wave. It is not a transverse wave (in gas) as we are accustomed to drawing it:

yep, what he said.

you are thinking about a sound wave as a static/standing wave, when it is actually flowing back and forth, past and through you.

of course, in a room you are hearing a bunch of reflections and interactions of the waves too, so that can mess things up really badly. however, in most cases (and especially with bass, since a lot passes through the walls) the reflections are weaker than the original signal, and don't completely cancel it out.

if your logic was true, headphones wouldn't work either, since most sound waves don't "fit" inside headphones in the way you describe...

fishmonkey wrote:yep, what he said.

you are thinking about a sound wave as a static/standing wave, when it is actually flowing back and forth, past and through you.

of course, in a room you are hearing a bunch of reflections and interactions of the waves too, so that can mess things up really badly. however, in most cases (and especially with bass, since a lot passes through the walls) the reflections are weaker than the original signal, and don't completely cancel it out.

if your logic was true, headphones wouldn't work either, since most sound waves don't "fit" inside headphones in the way you describe...

Loving it so far. The headphone argument is a good one. So it makes me think that there are two ways (and maybe more) in which we experience frequencies.
1. Their Intensity &
2. The wave itself
Also the reflections.
That may be why we appreciate music better in room that can accommodate all of these characteristics.
Otherwise, we are really listening to compressed versions of the sound. Kind of like mp3 compression.