Beat Lab

International Music Production School

GIVEAWAY! Ableton’s Semi-Modular Synth – Bengal

GIVEAWAY! Ableton’s Semi-Modular Synth – Bengal   We’ve been getting a lot of love on the web. Our Facebook and Instagram pages got a lot of attention lately and we want to show appreciation for all of you. We are giving away Ableton’s new Semi-Modular synth Bengal. Developed by Max for Cats, This Max for Live synth is capable of huge range of sounds. From gritty basslines, magical arps and fat chords. It comes with various logic operation like Lag, Scale and Math inspired by hardware modular synths. Check out this promo video to find out more: su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Ac8rMlkYg” showinfo=”no” rel=”no” modestbranding=”yes” https=”yes”su_video url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjb4U-cUGSE”/su_youtube_advanced     To enter the giveaway: Like our Facebook page Like and Comment on THIS POST

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Hooktheory Updates – Finding Cool Chord Progressions just got way Simpler

Hooktheory Updates – Finding Cool Chord Progressions just got way Simpler You may be familiar with Hooktheory already, but recent upgrades to their software have us checking out this cool software program in depth. Hooktheory is one of the best song analysis, creation, and education tools out there. It lets you choose from thousands of songs, then takes you behind the scenes to show you exactly how they “work” music theory wise. Then, you can open up Hookpad, a musical sketching pad that guides you to creating your own theory-savvy songs. So what’s new? divider style=”clear” Transposition Features Hooktheory now lets you transpose any song from its original key to any minor/major key or mode you want. This is a seriously cool feature that will get your songwriting gears spinning. In the examples on their website, you can see how songs like Hey Jude and Blank Space are thrown into an …

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5 Music Producers Killing the Game | Who Happen to be Female

5 Music Producers Killing the Game* *Who happen to be female. Whose your favorite male vocalist female producer duo? How about just your favorite female producer? No one comes to mind? This may not be surprising, as the beat making scene has historically been a boys club. The pairing of female vocalists and male producers is as prevalent as hi-hat rolls in a Drake song. The most up to date stats read that only 5-10% of music producer are female. And in fact, no woman has ever won the Gammy’s Producer of the Year award in a non-classical section (grr). This is not a reflection of the quality of work that women are producing, but the inclination of women to lean into (or be pushed into) performance roles instead of the technical ones. It’s a chicken and egg situation: women stay out of production roles because it’s a man’s world, …

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Pairing Music with Visuals – 7 Ideas to Get You Started

Pairing Music with Visuals – 7 Ideas to Get You Started Okay, so you’ve finally finished the dopest new song. It’s out on soundcloud, bandcamp, itunes, or what have you now. But you just don’t have a visual. As producers, we wear a lot of hats: instrumentalist, engineer, promoter, songwriter, manager… etc. And now? Tack videographer to the list. The importance of a visual accompaniment to any song cannot be understated. With youtube accounting for nearly 1/5th of all internet traffic, the importance of that video upload is indisputable. How much more likely is someone to share your song if it has a dope music video to accompany it? Yeah. Video is a powerful tool. But, while the idea of putting a video together can be overwhelming, there’s one thing certain: anything is better than nothing. So if the idea of a storyboard, film crew, budget, blah blah blah, isn’t …

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New Platforms for Ableton Link – Getting in Sync

New Platforms for Ableton Link – Getting in Sync Here at Beat Lab we’ve always encouraged our students to use the computer as an instrument, to be played solo or with others—but sometimes playing with others is easier said than done. Good news: a new age is among us. Forget the MIDI cables and technological trickery, with Live’s Link feature all you need to sync up with friends is *drumroll please* WIFI! Link makes it possible to connect Ableton Live with dozens of iOS applications, and the list is ever expanding. Just this week apeSoft’s Stria, MoMinstruments’ fluXpad and Lumber’s Brazilian Drum Machine got added to the list. All three of these new additions are tight apps, but the one that really stands out (unless you’re making Brazilian trip-hop) is the MoM’s fluXpad. It’s a sample sequencer that has you drawing in the sounds (welcome to art class… it’s gettin’ funky). With …

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Turn your old Game Boy into an Analogue Synth

Turn your old Game Boy into an Analogue Synth This is more on the fun side of music production but who knows, maybe you’ll find that perfect analogue computer sound your production has been missing. Nanoloop Mono is a cartridge designed so the analog components of the PIC microcontroller are connected in such a way that they form a hybrid soundchip with three analogue filters and a true random noise generator. Oliver Wittchow from Nanoloop explains, “On the original Game Boy models, one pin of the cartridge connector functions as an audio input, connected to the built-in amplifier. This unique feature allows you to generate sound on the cart and play it through the headphone output on a completely analogue signal path.” Pretty damn cool. Check out this video of the Nanoloop Mono in action: divider style=”clear” su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqod4HCpj58″ showinfo=”no” rel=”no” modestbranding=”yes” https=”yes”su_video url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjb4U-cUGSE”/su_youtube_advanced   Nanoloop Mono features a step …

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