the obsession with kick drums in dance music production never fails to amaze me. while technically it only serves to accentuate the pulse, many producers i know spend a great deal of their time on that perfect kick drum. in this post, i'll explain some of my strategies to get a good kick drum and share some kick drum samples.

last week, perspectiv's 'family tree 2' compilation saw the light of day. besides new tracks from agnes, ripperton and a myriad of other artists, i'm featured with a new track called 'pareidolia'.

the last year or so, i've been trying to make my music more effective. i have a tendency to take a cerebral approach to things, of which the style of this blog is a case in point. and it's not much different with my music. i've reached a point where i think that a lot of my music is just too clever to be really effective on the dance floor. so my challenge is to make something more visceral. and there are many ways to do that.

for me and many others, the most remarkable softsynth of 2008 was sonic charge's synplant. the swedish company scored a big hit with the microtonic drumsynthesizer, and i think it's quite courageous they followed it up with something so outlandish as synplant. i decided to do a couple of presets for it, and offer the results here. just download the zip and unzip it to your synplant folder.

the audio quality of ableton live is the subject of many lively debates on the internet. many people claim that live doesn't sound as good as, say, apple logic, and that live's summing bus is to blame. if the claims were true, i wouldn't hesitate a single moment to switch from live to logic for mixing. so i compared ableton live's and apple logic's summing bus with a null test, and talked about the results in a previous post. i couldn't find a significant difference, so whatever difference people are hearing, it's probably not due to the summing bus. but what could it be then? in my post, i already mentioned the placebo effect and peer pressure. but i think there is another, more substantive reason why live and logic sound different.

one of the great heroes of sounddesign for film is walter murch. he's primarily known for his work on 'the godfather' and 'apocalypse now', but my personal favorite is george lucas' 'thx 1138', from 1971. it's quite an experience to just listen to the audio of this film. murch is also known for inventing all kinds of techniques to manipulate sound. i'll explain one and show how we can replicate it in ableton live.

throw those 2 terms at google and within seconds you'll find yourself in the middle of one of the many wars on the intertoobz. on one side you'll find people who claim that live's summing bus sounds crap compared to for instance apple logic's. on the other side are people who claim that this is simply not true. or that, if it is true, it doesn't matter. for those who don't know what this is all about: summing happens when 2 or more signals are mixed together. the master channel of your daw is the most obvious example. if your summing bus is bad, every track you do suffers from it.

myspace can be a good way to draw some attention to your music. it's how i got my first minz release. and being incredibly smart, it took me only 2 years to figure out that it can also be a good way to follow other artists and labels. just add labels and artists to your friends and make sure you receive updates about them. i've only selected to be updated about added tracks and blog posts, but that gives me a healthy daily dose of news. the problem is... myspace looks and sounds crap. enter soundcloud.

if you want to know whose shoulders we're standing on in electronic dance music, you should watch the 2001 channel four documentary 'pump up the volume'. although the 3-part documentary is about the history of house music in the uk, almost half of it is dedicated to what happened in chicago and detroit before 1987.

of all the software updates that got announced at namm, two stand out for me. and the title tells you just which two.

the more i learn about the upcoming max for live, the happier i get. it seems you can indeed load any max/msp patch. and even jitter. probably with a bit of adaptation, but a conversion tool shouldn't take long. the promised integration i raved about yesterday, might extend even further than i thought. through the use of custom max objects, it will allow people to use open source stuff like processing or ruby inside max for live. some of these objects have already been created for max and no doubt people will be inspired to adapt them for max for live or create new objects where there are none.

i never had much interest in the annual namm music trade show, but yesterday i was glued to cdm's twitter feed for a minute-by-minute update. i blame native instruments, who had me bursting with curiosity about their 3 new products. luckily, i didn't have to add any of those to my wishlist. i can see the fun of maschine, but mpc style programming just doesn't fit the way i make music right now. what got me excited though, was all of ableton's news.

a softsynth i use a lot is the korg polysix, an emulation of the 1981 6-voice polyphonic syntesizer by the same name. it's a pretty basic synth, and the range of sounds that can be coaxed from it is limited. but what it does, it does rather well. i made a free preset bank for it, and i couldn't resist to also write a little personal review.