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Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

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Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#41

Post by teeja »

transmit101 wrote: post #12

The producer here is clearly talented, but the fact remains that notwithstanding Liam Howlett's setup in the late nineties, today's most basic music production software is a country mile more powerful than that which produced some of the most memorable music of the last twenty years. I often think that there exists a clear analogy between electronic music and video games. The computer games of the 80s and early 90s p…

In the end, you have to make music you want to make... that you like, that pushes where you want to push ... and then if other people like it great. If you try to please the crowd, but that doesn't motivate you ....

Frank Zappa pops into mind as an example. Eric Satie another. They just did their thing. It's an important decision: If pop sounds are your thing ... which might be called 'musicality' ... it's a much easier road. But most ear candy is soon forgotten. And the 'deep' stuff takes time to find an audience.

Hundreds of thousands of people have access to the technology, so sounding modern but standing out from the crowd is really hard. Luckily, the tech has also provided the means to reach an audience you could never reach before. So whatever you do can find an audience.

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#42

Post by radley »

hnhg wrote: post #39
radley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's pretty fair to presume that they were pioneers of rave. True they weren't big at the same time as the Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, or Westbam, but they were releasing tracks as early as '91: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prodigy And unlike their predecessors, their production is far more in line with the rave sound and iconography that any other group of that era.

They were around from the beginning but they had a lot of contemporaries too. Like I said, I'm not an expert but rave culture arguably got going in 89 with the rising popularity of house and then techno (this still sounds fresh from 89 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6musPMSe24Q ) Around 90 and 91 it moved to a focus on more hardcore techno and breakbeat. Mr Kirk's Nightmare by 4Hero was around 1990, which sounds quit…

No worries. I was actually producing my first underground events back in '90 in San Diego. Obviously I wasn't in the middle of the makers, but I was moderately aware of what was going on.

We didn't really have "techno" & "breakbeat" until '91, but there were hints of it. Meat Beat Manifesto were doing industrial breaks using the drum samples that came into popularity later on. I don't have time to go into history, but there's also the US techno influences that came into play in '90.

I can share one story: back in '89 hanging on in a tiny record shop in San Diego known for industrial, new beat, and dance music. They got in some domestic imports. We gave them a listen and thought "these are really great, but where are the lyrics?"

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#43

Post by hnhg »

radley wrote: post #42
hnhg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were around from the beginning but they had a lot of contemporaries too. Like I said, I'm not an expert but rave culture arguably got going in 89 with the rising popularity of house and then techno (this still sounds fresh from 89 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6musPMSe24Q ) Around 90 and 91 it moved to a focus on more hardcore techno and breakbeat. Mr Kirk's Nightmare by 4Hero was around 1990, which sounds quit…

No worries. I was actually producing my first underground events back in '90 in San Diego. Obviously I wasn't in the middle of the makers, but I was moderately aware of what was going on. We didn't really have "techno" & "breakbeat" until '91, but there were hints of it. Meat Beat Manifesto were doing industrial breaks using the drum samples that came into popularity later on. I don't have time to go into history, bu…

It would have been great to see those early events in San Diego. I'm very envious! One thing we did have back in the early 90s here in Manchester was a great radio station called Sunset (it quickly became a commercial mainstream station, alas). Some shows can be found here: http://durftal.com/music/bonus1/index.html

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#44

Post by radley »

joezydeco wrote: post #11
tumult wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly hardware rack samplers. I think Liam used (uses?) Akai S1100 or a similar model. You play in chunks of audio to them, trim the waveform to the part you need, optionally build a keyboard-split/layered patch with it, and then play it via MIDI. They also have some envelopes for pitch modulation and other stuff you can use. You can do this with sounds you make yourself (The Prodigy frequently samples their own syn…

Exactly my point. This stuff was way harder without all these nice comfy ProTools and ACID GUIs. The keyboards never had interfaces that were easy to use when doing things like trimming waveforms. Must have been hella tedious.

Yeah, the Akai's were pretty powerful samplers back then. Depeche Mode did everything on E-mu Emulators. For the rest of us it was the Ensoniqs...

Think of it as sound "hacking". Before samplers all we had were tape loops and synths. Samplers were a ton of fun because suddenly you could play any sound, including people's voices. It was a revolutionary new approach in the late 80s & early 90s...

I'm an ooooold geri-raver...

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#45

Post by zandorg »

messel wrote: post #24
zandorg wrote: post #13

I once thought Prodigy used mod trackers (those in-game chip tunes), but I found out they just use loads of Roland equipment. After years of using soft samplers and synths, I recently moved into a bigger house and set aside a whole room for my music studio. With that much space, I now have: +2 Akai S950 samplers (with enough memory for about 16 drums) +3 mixing desks (2 vintage, one newer - the Yamaha vintage makes e…

Will forward these comments to my brother. He's a long time digital producer although I'd be hard pressed to get him to mix together ambient/electronic/d&b/whateverIlove. Sounds like a pretty sick and expensive setup. Nice job putting it all together.

Actually, I bought the mixer after I couldn't split about 10 signals to the soundcard any more! I had splitters going into splitters and it was a mess.

Then the mixer I bought had FX inputs, so I bought the outboard FX units. Then I read about the S950 and bought 2 . They have 8 outputs which you can run through a mixing desk and EQ, adjust gain and volume, and even put an FX unit on a drum.

The great thing is all this equipment was bought on eBay in just a couple of months.

I put together a spreadsheet of the costs. The Akai's, mixers and effects units came to about £1000. The Xpander wasn't cheap, but I bought that in 2004. The organ was about £200 including postage.

But the point is, you can build a retro studio quite cheaply and experiment.

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#46

Post by goatforce5 »

teeja wrote: post #38
joezydeco wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point. This stuff was way harder without all these nice comfy ProTools and ACID GUIs. The keyboards never had interfaces that were easy to use when doing things like trimming waveforms. Must have been hella tedious.

Especially back when most CPUs were about 200MHz tops, drives were much smaller, and turning on a single reverb brought everything to a screaming halt. (Freezing trax was not an option.) One of the better DAWs at the time was Opcode's Vision (still is, tho they went out of business back then)(Live didn't exist, Pro Tools didn't have MIDI worth mentioning) and the first decent plug-ins were just being released... noth…

Here's Herbie Hancock demonstrating a Fairlight CMI synth/sampler on Sesame Street in '84-ish:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKoisNv1ftw&feature=relat...

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#47

Post by texel »

mikeryan wrote: post #8
swombat wrote: post #7

Back when Prodigy did this in the late 1990's they must have used tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment... samplers, synths, sequencers, filters, etc... Today, the entire thing can be done in a single piece of software. Wow.

Even in the late 1990s they had powerful audio editing software. The first version of ProTools came out in 1991 and there were a ton of cheaper tools as well. I'm not saying they didn't do this on thousands of dollars of equipment but in 1997 there's nothing you saw on this video that couldn't be done on a single piece of software (ok maybe two) even then. It wasn't the dark ages. And get off my lawn.

You still couldn't chop audio nearly this easily, or move it around visually like you can in Ableton. Most of the manipulations were probably done in the sampler, so they all had to be done by ear, and sequenced out using MIDI. I think the big time-saver now is the "elastic" audio capability built into modern sequencers, allowing you to easily realign transients within the audio.

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#48

Post by adriand »

transmit101 wrote: post #12

The producer here is clearly talented, but the fact remains that notwithstanding Liam Howlett's setup in the late nineties, today's most basic music production software is a country mile more powerful than that which produced some of the most memorable music of the last twenty years. I often think that there exists a clear analogy between electronic music and video games. The computer games of the 80s and early 90s p…

I think that the standard when making electronic music has to be, does what I have created bear repetition, without any effects?

In other words, if I distill this down to the simple melody, harmony and rhythm that is present in my music, can it stand on its own?

You can always tell the difference between a musician and a technician.

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#49

Post by chrischen »

transmit101 wrote: post #12

The producer here is clearly talented, but the fact remains that notwithstanding Liam Howlett's setup in the late nineties, today's most basic music production software is a country mile more powerful than that which produced some of the most memorable music of the last twenty years. I often think that there exists a clear analogy between electronic music and video games. The computer games of the 80s and early 90s p…

I think we still see innovation in games, but what's happened is there are also more clones. So every year we get a bunch of first person shooters, that are more or less the same type of game but with different storylines, graphics, and environments. So this drowning by copycat games makes it seem as if innovative new games are not being produced as much anymore.

Re: Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

#50

Post by ncarlson »

mikeryan wrote: post #8
swombat wrote: post #7

Back when Prodigy did this in the late 1990's they must have used tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment... samplers, synths, sequencers, filters, etc... Today, the entire thing can be done in a single piece of software. Wow.

Even in the late 1990s they had powerful audio editing software. The first version of ProTools came out in 1991 and there were a ton of cheaper tools as well. I'm not saying they didn't do this on thousands of dollars of equipment but in 1997 there's nothing you saw on this video that couldn't be done on a single piece of software (ok maybe two) even then. It wasn't the dark ages. And get off my lawn.

Very true. Between Rewire and Cubase you had almost a complete music studio as early as 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCycle_%28software%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubase#Cubase_VST3.0_Macintosh

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