 Hello, Ocelator Sync here. A few weeks ago I put out a set which I wrote and performed on the Electron Digitact and since putting it out online, I've had a number of people ask me about the process that went into preparing for writing and performing that set, so I figured I'd do a video on just that. So this video will kind of be a combination of tips that I found useful while I was putting the set together and also kind of just going through the process in general, talking about what worked, what maybe could have gone better. And hopefully they'll answer the questions that those people had and also maybe inspire some new ideas along the way. So with that, let's get to the first tip. So this first tip is probably the most important out of the whole lot and that is that if you want to put together a set like this, commit to that idea and set some reasonable goals and expectations. So for example, when I decided that I wanted to put this set together, I kind of gave myself some goals and some guidelines for the way I was going to work. So the first one was that I wanted to be done within a month, so from the point where I decided that I was going to actually do this, I knew that in a month's time, my goal was to have it recorded and written and the video put out and the whole lot. The next thing is that sort of from how much music I was going to create, I knew that I wanted to have at least eight patterns. I actually went slightly over that in the end, but that's fine. I hit my goal. The other thing that I kind of gave myself were guidelines around how I was going to actually work on it. My time availability is kind of restricted. I've got a young baby in the house, so I knew that I was only going to be able to be working on this after they've gone to bed. I was literally doing it on a ironing board in my room, but what I had kind of put in place for myself as a goal was that if I sat down and was going to be working on something, as long as I wasn't disturbed by child care duties, I was going to finish a pattern. I was allowed to go back and revisit them, sure, but I wanted to have basically established an entire pattern per session that I had working on it, and that worked out really well for me. I think I reached that goal every single time, a couple of sessions, a couple of evenings when the inspiration was really flowing. I got through two patterns and stuff. So setting those goals and those guidelines and actually committing to the idea of doing this is super, super important. So the second tip that I'd maybe offer if you're going to try and put together a set like this is try to reduce the number of choices that you are going to have to make about anything other than the actual writing of the music. So one thing that I did that made a massive difference for my workflow is that before I wrote any of the music, I picked out a small subset of samples that I wanted to work with. So I went into the samples menu. I went through all the factory samples. I went through all of the stuff that I had brought in recently, and I went through and I thought, OK, well, I need a selection of kicks, claps, hi-hats. I need some noise, some single cycle where I formed some other sounds that kind of appealed to me. And I put them in my sample pool before I started writing any music. And my intention was never to go back into picking up samples because there is nothing that distracts me from making music quite as much as kind of window shopping for presets. It's a complete distraction for me. And, you know, you can spend half an hour trying to find a snare drum that's just right when the one that you've already got there is good enough and you could be working on the actual music. You can always go back and tweak, I guess, but that made a massive difference to me. Actually, as it happens about two thirds of the way through, maybe three quarters of the way through, I realized that there were some sounds that I definitely wanted that I just didn't have in the sample set. So I did go back there, you know, needless consistency is the hobgobbling of a feasible mind. And you don't want to have to restrict yourself dogmatically, but kind of setting up that framework where I didn't have to make any of those choices really meant that every time I sat down to work on the set, I was only working on the music for the set. One of the other ways that I did this which is kind of a more minor thing. But again, it was just a choice that I didn't have to make. I decided really early on that every pattern was going to be four bars long. I didn't have to have that decision. I didn't have to think about how am I going to be clever with using conditional tricks to make it feel like it's four bars long when it's not four bars long. No, I just had four bars long. Every single pattern is four bars long. Didn't have to think about it. It was just another choice that I didn't have to think about. And I could just concentrate on the music. That approach really works well in the door as well, actually, as it happens. I know that Jeremy from Red Beings Recording has mentioned this a couple of times around how he has kind of templates set up ahead of time in Ableton. So that the stuff that he usually grabs for and stuff that he knows works are just just kind of there for any particular type of session. And it just means again that you're not having to make choices that aren't about the actual writing music. You can always go back and tweak sounds at the end. But you know, while that inspiration is flowing, don't do things that are going to interrupt that flow, like trying to pick out the right high hat sound. Okay, let's get on to actually talking about writing the patterns themselves. I don't really want to talk too much about the sort of ins and outs of of, you know, conditional tricks and note repeats and that kind of thing. There are a couple of tricks that I used fairly consistently, which I am going to talk about in a couple of other videos for the dig attack coming up fairly soon. And I want to talk sort of more broadly about was the workflow as I was putting the music together. So I guess probably the thing that I did most consistently while I was putting this stuff together is that I wrote all of the patterns in the set in the order that they were then performed in. And one of the things that I decided early on that I wanted to do was always have an element from the previous pattern in the next pattern, which kind of creates a continuity around what you're doing. So for example, once I'd finished this one here. What I would do is I would go into pattern and copy it. And then I would take that pattern and paste it onto the next one along. So now pattern two is the same as pattern one. And then I would decide, okay, well, what is the element which is sort of really important to me in terms of what's going to go into the next track. So it might have been in this case. So it might be in this case that the shaker that's on six, I decided was like, that was the signature sound that was going to go into the next pattern. So I would mute off everything else. And then I would start building the track backup from from scratch. So you know, I would go into one of the tracks and I would clear that track off. And I would delete everything that was on it as well. So I had an empty track and then I would start thinking, okay, well, perhaps this one's going to be a four to the floor kick here. And maybe it's not going to be the same kick sound. So I go in and find a new kick sound. And so on. So I'd start building up with this initial sound that was still kind of in there. To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced of how much that added to the continuity of the set. I think on some patterns, it definitely did. But I think in other places, it was maybe just a thing that I was doing, because I decided I was doing it. And as I said, that's kind of valuable anyway, because it was a choice that I wasn't having to make. And my workflow was always this next pattern is based off the previous one, by at least one element. The other benefit, I don't know whether it's a benefit, but certainly a side effect of working that way is that I didn't have to go through and set up my reverb and delay to be the same as the previous thing. That's certainly kind of acoustic space element to things I think probably did had a consistency across the set, even if having something from the previous previous pattern in that set did. One other thing that I would say if you're going to work this way, and probably in general, if you're doing a set like this, is that you want to be going back occasionally and checking the sort of overall perceived levels of your patterns, certainly as I'd got to sort of pattern 6789. When I went back, I'd realized that I'd let the volume creep up quite a lot. And that meant I was also hitting the compressor a lot harder, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was kind of changing the way that things were feeling. One other tip, given that way of working is that there's no point adjusting the track volumes. You want to just set those to a reasonable level and you want to then be doing things if you want to rebalance things between patterns, you want to be doing that from the AMP page rather than using the track. That is if you're not going to be moving that during the actual performance. So anyway, then I wrote the patterns. And once I'd written the patterns, I needed to work out how I was going to perform them. And that's when making notes came into the whole situation. So I created this system here, it's probably completely cryptic. But I went through and I jammed the patterns for a while and to work out kind of what worked together and what things should be brought in together. What things shall I avoid bringing together? What situation should I avoid dropping down to? So I know that one of these one of these pieces of paper somewhere it says do not do not drop to drums and bass because on pattern four dropping to just drums and bass sounded lame. And I didn't want to make it sound lame. The other thing that I ended up having to do, because I think probably as a side effect of bringing one pattern into the next and working that way is that I ended up with the situation where I had stuff all over the tracks. The only consistency really is that the kick was always on one. Thank God. That was something that I did make sure that I did. But for example, here the snare is onto where it kind of should be. And then three here isn't toms. It should says toms on the on the actual Diggatattis note. It was kind of a poppy melody. And then the two different kinds of melody here on the bass and the lead one, four and five, actually is where Clap and Calwell should be. Yeah. But essentially I ended up with kind of a mess. So this sort of note taking system allowed me to remember what was on all of the all of the actual tracks as I went along. One other thing that this kind of highlighted to me as I was kind of jamming the tracks and making notes was that there were very few times where actually I wanted every single track on at once. Some of the earlier patterns, which were a bit more sparse, yeah, but you know, often actually having everything on at once kind of you think it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger, but actually it just ended up being kind of messy, which didn't really work out so well. So that was also kind of a way of keeping track of what was going on here. But probably the most important thing, if you can see every track has got a line, sorry, every pattern. Some of the tracks got a line above and some of them have got a line underneath. This was my way of specifying what tracks should be turned on when we started this pattern and what tracks should be turned on as we transitioned into the next pattern. You know, what happened within the patterns in terms of turning on the mutes and stuff as I was performing it, that was kind of improvised. You know, I had notes on what I shouldn't do and there was some guidance about what should come in first and stuff, but it was kind of improvised. But where I started and where I ended was super, super important to me and to that end, if the camera wants to catch up, there we go. Probably the most important thing that I did was before I went and performed is that I went into this mute mode here, so shift and then bank twice, the purple mute mode. So this is the pattern mutes. What the pattern mutes is, is the green mutes here, if you change to a different pattern, these mutes will still be the mutes that are active on that pattern. Whereas the purple mutes are only for this particular pattern that you're on at the moment and if you move to another pattern, you will have different mutes set up on all of them. So what I did before I started the actual performance or the takes for the performances that I went through and I set up all of our start points for each of the patterns and then I saved that into the project so that if I did a performance where it all went wrong, I could just reload the project and I have my initial start points for the set already in there. That was super, super useful and such a time saver when I had to restart a couple of times. So at this point we've set up our creative process so that we can write as efficiently as possible. We've made the notes so that we know how our performance is going to go. We've practiced a little bit, probably not as much as we should have done perhaps, and we've come to the actual timer for recording the performance. Probably the biggest piece of advice that I could give you for that is that you need to reconcile the midpoint which your requirement for perfection meets the audience's perception of a good performance because one thing that I found when I was trying to practice is that I was sat basically going over the first two patterns over and over again because there was always something that wasn't quite right or I didn't do the transition quite right or I hadn't brought stuff in early enough and that meant that when I was practicing I was basically just spending hours going between these first two patterns and never really looking at the other patterns and if that was the approach that I had taken when it came to actually record I probably never would have put this out because I would have ended up hating the entire process. So what I'm trying to say here is that if you are doing a live performance on a synth on a groove box it is a live performance and a live performance is not perfect. There will be things that go wrong. There are three things in the recorded version of the set that are definitely as far as I'm concerned wrong. The first two happened fairly early on and they were kind of like as I did them I was like no that's probably fine it's close enough for jazz kind of situation and I kind of just carried on. The third thing that went wrong happened quite a long way in maybe on pattern nine or something and when it happened I had a panic actually and probably made it worse initially but then I made the assessment that no I'm most of the way through the set the rest of the set has been good I don't want to restart now because it's just going to bum me out and I then went on to quickly follow some advice that Prince had about making mistakes in music and what Prince said is that if you make a mistake while you're playing do the same thing again so that the mistake seemed like it was intentional which is what I did is if you can watch back and see where I do it hopefully you can't spot it that's kind of the point at the tip but yeah don't sweat the performance at the point where you end up hating the entire process you know you need to be vibing off it it needs to be feeling good for you if you make a massive cock up then sure stop because you don't want to have something that's that's bad but minor little imperfections that is what live music is it's never perfect so don't expect it to be okay we've kind of come to the end here and there's just time for one or piece of advice and that piece of advice is to go out and buy some cheap table lamps there's a hair there some cheap table lamps and some RGB lights because that made the performance loads better yay these ones I got then the lamps I got from from aster and they were cheap and the RGB oh they create ground loops which is good and the RGB lights were like five pound for two off of amazon or something tightly worth it everyone should have them for all of their electronic music videos because their ace very cheap very vibey and certainly made the recording process more fun the room was nice and dark and the the lights were vibing and so was I so anyway I hope that was useful and if it wasn't useful at least it was interesting if you enjoyed the video please do hit the thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because there will be more dig attack stuff coming up fairly fairly soon I've got a couple of ideas of stuff I definitely want to cover some of it actually it's related to the set as well and some other stuff as well and general synth stuff of course if you're interested then we've got lots of synth stuff happening on the channel at all times otherwise thank you so much for joining me I will see you again soon take care bye bye