Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier

Mein musikalischer Weihnachtsgruß 2017: “Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier”, ein Choral mit der Melodie von J. S. Bach (BWV 469). Ich habe das Lied für 5-saitigen E-Bass arrangiert. Zum Einsatz kommen neben einem Looper analoge Effekt-Pedale.

“Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier” (Beside Thy Manger Here I Stand) – an adaptation of J. S. Bach’s melody (BWV 469), arranged for bass and played by Tim Teissen.
This version features live looping, an odd-meter loop cycle, and an improvisation. No overdubs, everything you hear was recorded in a single take.

Season’s greetings and best wishes for the New Year!

The Power of Konnakol (7): How to play anything over anything

Step-by-step instructions how to play any number of notes over any number of beats. This video lesson includes the following polyrhythms:
3 over 4, 3 over 5, 3 over 7, 4 over 7, 5 over 4, 7 over 4.

 

topics: rhythm, konnakol, subdivisions, polyrhythms
Level: advanced
Instruments: for all instruments
Duration: approx. 9:40 min


 

For a list of all my video lessons go here.
You could also use the tag cloud (in the footer area of this website) in order to look for video lessons.

All German-speaking viewers may have a look at my translation page.

Exporting stems and mix-buss compression – A workaround

Some mixing engineers like to have compression or even limiting on their mix-buss. This is fine unless you want to export your mix into stems, especially when you decided for stem-mastering of your song. (If you don’t know what stem mastering is, please read this first.)

The problem is as follows:

Let’s say you have your mixdown (brown) split into two stems, a so-called TV-stem (without vocals, here: blue), and all the vocals (yellowish).

When your mixing engineer exports these two stems (blue, yellow), your mix-buss compressor (or limiter) behaves differently than during mixdown (where it is fed by the whole mix), because some tracks are muted. You see that in the vocal stem, there are parts of the song with no vocals at all, meaning that the compressor is not going to get triggered (surely not in the way as it is triggered by the brown mixdown), when you’re exporting the vocal stem. And since the idea of stems is that they sum up to the original mix, this is not going to happen here as long as there’s a compressor (or limiter) on the mix-buss.

As a consequence, there are two options in this scenario:

  1. Using no mix-buss compression at all, or
  2. the following workaround:

Whether you have a plug-in (virtual) or real analog outboard compressor (it’s up to you …), the key thing is that it should have an external sidechain! (There are even limiter plug-ins that do, I won’t tell which, so try to find some on your own …) So that when you’re exporting stems, the compressor is triggered by the whole mix (i.e. you have to route the mixdown file to the compressors external sidechain) – even when you’re only exporting the vocal stem, for example. The compressor “reacts” only to the sidechain signal, but processes the stem you want it to process. This  is the closest you can get to ensure that all your stems sum up to your mixdown after you exported all of them correctly. All’s well for mastering, then!

Hope this workaround is helpful! More tips coming soon …