Abletonlife.com is a great little site. If you’re into Ableton Live in any of its forms, be sure to check it out. But for now, just check out this great “screencast” done by the folk(s) at Ableton Life: an intro to DJing in Live.

If you need help building a Live DJ rig, be sure to check out my article about the subject here.

Part 2 after the jump!

How To DJ In Ableton Live Part 2: Working With Clips, Setting Up Effects, Blending Songs from Ryan on Vimeo.

The Launchpad comes with a couple of “User Modes” which are modes made to be assigned to just about anything you can think of. This adds a lot of flexibility to the Launchpad as the video above demonstrates.

So Ultrabeat is a monster of a plugin, but there are a few simple tricks to using that save a lot of time and make the plugin really flexible for something that comes bundled with a DAW.

Setting up a multichannel version of Ultrabeat allows you to group your samples and play them out of ultrabeat into different aux tracks.  I chose to have kicks come out of the main track, snares out of another aux, toms a second aux and cymbals out of a third. Basically I can put different compressors and EQ’s on the kicks than I do on the snares.  Then I can tweak the hi-end of the cymbals and gate the toms – all on separate channels.  Pretty cool, right?  Check out the video!

Star Trek Sound Effects Editor Mark Mangini goes into the details of designing sounds for Star Trek Movies.  Pretty fascinating – there’s actually quite a bit of great information on Designing Sound, which is where I came across this video.

Oh and part two:

Definitely enjoyed his description of a giant biker beating the crap out of a dumpster to create “time waves” hitting a ship.

synthPond 2.0 Tutorial from zach gage on Vimeo.

Loving it!  It’s an interesting conceptual instrument – you place nodes on a surfaces that generate notes when hit by waves (ripples in the “pond”). Some nodes just produce notes, some emanate their own waves.  Anyway, its pretty awesome, check it out.

Really awesome guitar FX chain – not the most original chain, but it’s definitely explained nicely and has some decent sound samples.  Check it out.

Found on CrunchGear.

I know we’ve got a looooong video about iZotope’s Alloy from AES, but here’s a more in-depth and specific video about the plugin if you’re interested.  Some good examples (with better sound).

Terry from iZotope was kind enough to demo us through their new Alloy Plugin.  It offers an exciter, two sets of dynamics, EQ, De-essing, and a ton of crazy presets.  Check it out!

Waves Demonstrated MultiRack – a Live Sound Interface for their Plugins.

MultiRack features Virtual racks onto which you insert plugins.  Each Rack and be patched into the inserts on a console or to aux send/returns.

Waves demonstrated their new Vocal Rider plugin meant to automate the level riding a mix engineer would do on a vocal track.

Quick run-down of how it works:

• Insert Vocal Rider on a vocal track that you want automated
• Assign your instrumental tracks to the sidechain input of Vocal Rider
• Adjust the Range that you’ll allow the fader to move and the sensitivity to vocals or music.
• Set to Fast or Slow Response
• Hit play and watch the fader ride the vocal for you

You can also use the automation buttons at the bottom of the plugin to let Vocal Rider write automation to the track it is inserted on.