Warbeats NFX Blog

I am what I am and so are you.

NFX — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:55:56 GMT

It seems like a lot of people spend time trying to portay an image of what they're not.

I consider myself part of the hip hop culture because I love a lot of things in and around it. Music, grafitti, dance etc, are all things about hip hop that I am a fan and/or participant in.

But let me tell you what I'm not... I'm not a playa, a pimp or a a hustler. I'm not a thug, a soldier or a gangsta. I'm not iced out, ridin on dubs or rockin the trendy gear. If you saw me on the street you would not guess that I make beats. If you talked to me on the phone you would not suspect that I have a love for hip hop.

Next I'll tell you what I am... I'm a father, a son, a brother, a husband, a hard working man, a deep thinker and some might say a teacher or mentor. Boring to some, but I'm keeping it real.

Too many people think "keeping it real" is portraying an image like being a thug, a gangsta, you know everything that I'm not. Especially if they come from an area similar to where I grew up in and still live to this day.

Keeping it real, means being honest with yourself and those around you.

If you know something is wrong or disagreeable with your inner morals and you continue to do it, you are fighting yourself. You are distracting your own self from accomplishing the things you really want in life.

The first step in keeping it real, is to know who "You" are. What defines "You"? I'm not talking about the physical part of you. What if your body ceased to be and your mind was somehow captured and stored in a bottle where your thoughts and ideas could still exist without any outside influence? You would no longer stress about impressing people. All material things would cease to exist. Cars, clothes, computers, websites, everything. What would you do? Who would you be? Are you completely that person today? If not, why not? What are you doing today to reach that ideal mind state?

And why do i think this important enough for me to write about?

Because it is vital for everyone to understand and embrace who they really are. Yes it's cliche and corny sounding, but that doesn't make it false.

The mind state of understanding yourself gives you the power to manifest your desires much more easily. When you know what your truly want and what direction your moral compass is pointing, it's easy to get those things without trying as hard because you are following a natural path. You are no longer sidetracked by the need to show off and impress people. You are no longer concerned with things that only serve to distract you from accomplishing your goals.

We are all human (I hope) so we are bound to get sidetracked occasionally. Many of us just forget our inner truths when we are busy chasing the idea that something outside of ourselves can make us happy.

It takes work to develop your mind state but it is simple to do. The first thing you have to learn is how to acknowledge what you truly believe. The second thing is to follow the beliefs as much as possible. Finally do your best to not let other influences take you off the path. Everything else falls into place naturally.

So how does this relate to music production?

When you are making music that is also honest to yourself (even if others arent feelin it) then you can truly shine and things will come easy. The easier something is the more fun it is and the faster you will grow and develop the skills around it.

Every great producer is great because they are being themselves and that makes them unique - just like you. So be you.

I don't run this site anymore, it runs me...

NFX — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:11:04 GMT

Man.

Somedays it just plain sucks to be responsible for this site.

Don't get me wrong, I love the site to death and the community too.

The problem is that the site is getting to a tipping point and there are many days I just can't keep up.

I havent made a beat in weeks, maybe months. I sure havent touched my MIDI controller or FL Studio for anything but doing a tutorial in over a month.

Every little tweak I make to the site has the potential to break it. And that could mean hours or days of work to get it right again.

I don't know if I should record a tutorial, make a beat, go into chat, check the forum, answer my emails, add all the myspace requests, read the youtube comments, write an article, give some feedback, start a new contest, etc etc etc etc etc etc.

I don't want to sound all down because I'm not really, I just need to vent this for a minute.

Truth is.. Warbeats is one of the best things I have done in my life and I have to thank all of you for giving me so much in the way of support and thanks.

Thanks to the mods and volunteers and contributors. I created Warbeats, but you all have fed and nutured Warbeats and continue to help it grow.

:) There.. now I feel better.

Music and culture

NFX — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:55:30 GMT

Sometimes I wonder why music is so important to human beings.

Just about every culture has some form of music that is unique to themselves and helps us to understand them a little bit. But why is this so?

Victor Hugo once said "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. " Is this true?

Does music create a culture or do culture create music? I would guess that the culture creates the music, but they are so closely born that it is almost impossible to distinguish.

For example, Flamenco music was born out of a small area in Spain that was occupied by the native people, Gypsies and Islamic folk. Yet it is distinctly not anyone of those individual elements. It embodies many of the traits we think of about those cultures - passion, drama, excitement and mystery. In fact, Flamenco originally described the lifestyle of these folk not their music. Eventually the lifestyle evolved and moved on but the music remained.

The same is true of hip hop. There was first a culture that existed and then a musical expression was born from it. You cannot seperate hip-hop the lifestyle from hip-hop the musical genre yet but you can see the evolution from the original party/boasting raps to conscious raps to gangsta rap and so on. At some point will hip-hop the lifestyle move on and leave behind just a musical legacy?

I guess in the end it doesn't matter because we will always find some form of expression for ourselves and thats all we care about, but I still trip on how it can be so powerful. You will never find a crowd of people moved to react like they do when a hit record is played in a club for any other medium. It's not like a picture of the Mona Lisa is going to make some hotties get wild and shake dem tings!

What I Use (hardware) as of Jan 2009

NFX — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:18:37 GMT

I get emails from people asking me what I use or recommend as far as equipment so I figured I'd break it down for you who are interested.

Computer: ZT Affinity Intel Quad Core Q6600 2.4GHz 4GB DDR2 500GB HDD

I got the computer from Costco online for $579. They don't sell that model anymore but it is similar to this one. My only complaints are it's Vista (which I'm not a big fan of) and it's got a pretty noisy fan. If you're doing recording with a microphone near the computer it will be an issue. I replaced my fans with quietr ones but the case is still not insulated enough to be as quiet as I would like it to be. My previous computer was in an Antec silent case and was just awesomely quiet.

I added to this computer, a better video card. Unfortunately this card also has a fan which adds to the noise level a little bit. If I didn't plan to play the occasional game, I would have left this off. As a matter of fact I may remove it because I don't really play games on the computer anymore.

Audio Device: Line 6 POD Studio UX2

This was not my first external audio device, but it is by far the best one I have ever owned. It has two phantom powered mic inputs and two line-inputs for guitars or other external gear. It comes with a software you need to run to enable the recording mode called Gearbox. Playing back audio doesn't require Gearbox to be running.

I got this on sale at Amazon for $139. It retails for $200 so that was agreat bargain. I did endup paying extra from Line 6 to get some extra presets and allow Gearbox to run as a plug-in. I should mention that Gearbox is also a guitar amp simulator so I wanted that feature in FL and the plug-in version is NOT required to record or playback in FL.

Looking back on this purchase I think the Line 6 POD Studio UX1 would have been a better choice because it has 1 mic and 1 line-in which is all I really need.

When doing my videos, I need to record from the Mic and from what the computer is playing. This is a special circumstance that I could not get the device to do. This is not a weakness because normally you don't want the playback to mix with the input, but for my tutorials I need to speak and playback in FL to explain things. I worked around this by feeding my output into an old SB X-FI card I had installed. So when I record tutorials, Camtasia is setup to record from the SB line in and not the UX2. My normal beat making and recording all goes through the UX2.

MIDI Controller: M-Audio AXIOM 49

I have my share of controllers all of them worked fine except my MPD16 which always crashes my computer (all 3 I've tried) due to poor drivers. I bought the Axiom for a couple of reasons. First it has transport controls. These allow you to control record/stop/play from the controller. Second it has drum pads. It only has 8 pads but thats all I really need and they are not tiny pads they are the same size as on the MPC. Of course it has all the cool extra knobs, faders etc.

I paid $208 for it through Amazon. I love Amazon by the way. Most things have free shipping and they have pretty good deals.

Setting up the Axiom was a little confusing at first because it didn't have drivers for Vista out of the box, I had to download them. I also downloaded the configuration program called Enigma, which is a requirement. The good news is that once you set up the device for FL, everything works great. There is one minor problem I have that I haven't figured out as of this writing. My MIDI notes get sent twice. I noticed that the Axiom lists itself as two MIDI devices in FL so I may have a configuration issue. You can't really tell that they get sent twice since the notes are on top of eachother but when you go to tweak a not with the mouse I see that two notes are stacked. No one else has reported this issue so I'm sure it's unique to my setup and I'll figure it out.

Monitors: KRK RP-5 Rokit Powered Reference Studio Monitor

These monitors replaced my AlesisM1 Active MkII monitors and while they are smaller, they sound way better. I left my monitors on over a weekend and a power surge blew a fuse in one of them. I was happy to see that they included a spare fuse! Unfortunately I left em on again during a surge and it blew out the fuse again. So make sure you have these things on a good power source. Replaceing the fuse is a lot better than buying new monitors though!

I paid $199 for the pair.

Headphones: Audio Technica ATH-M50 Professional Headphones

I need headphone when I record my tutorials and these work pretty good. I don't like to use them for mixing down/matering though because they highlight sounds too easily. These replaced my all-time favorite BeyerDynamic DT770s and Sennheiser HD570. Both of which are perfectly fine in their own right but just had wear and tear.

I originally paid $145 for these and they are cheaper now but thats how it goes.

One thing I always look for in headphones is that they completely go around the ear. If you are doing any headphone work for long periods of time, do NOT get the models that press on your ear. Ear buds are also not great for long sessions, but I do use ear buds for casual listening at work and on my iPod.

Other gear:

External drives. I have seven extrnal drives for my audio computer. Some are network drives that plug into the hub, some are Firewire and most are USB. They are all different brands: Buffalo, Ximeta, ACOM, Western Digitaland IOMega. All are diff sizes from 120GB to 1000GB. I really only use 3 of them for the audio. The rest hold backups of my older stuff and family pictures, etc.

If I was to buy one today I would probably go for the AcomData PureDrive 1 TB USB because it's a great deal at $119 and my oldest external drive is an ACOM so I know they last.

Microphone: For recording my vids, I use an Audio Technica ATR30 Microphone. It's cheap and gets the job done. I also have a more "pro" mice but I never use it since the room noise gets picked up very easily by it.

Video Monitors: I use a dual screen setup. Once you go to dual screens, you'll never want to go back.I use one 24" wide screen and one 19" wide screen (rotated).

The rest of my gear is stuff I rarely use anymore so it's not worth mentioning.

I may explain the software I use in a future post.

Mixing in 3 dimensions

NFX — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:37:11 GMT

I have a book somehwere that talks about mixing in 3 dimiensions. I wish I could find it so I could more accurately paraphrase it but whatever...

The premise of the book is basically to say that music happens in three dimension. Visually speaking the 3 dimensions are left/right, up/down, and forward/back. Musically speaking they are similar:

left/right = panning or balance

you can control the position of a sound from left to right using the balance or panning controls on your mix.

forward/back = volume and reverb

a louder volume makes something sound closer and lower volume and it's farther away. Reverb has a similar effect. The more reverb the farther away a sound is perceived.

up/down = frequencies (high to low)

Frequencies occur from low (basses, kick drums, tuba, etc) to midrange (vocals, guitars, piano, etc) to high (flutes, hi-hats, piccollo, etc)

Now the key to a great mix is a balanced mix, meaning try to have a mixture of all the elements spread across the various dimensions.

Some examples:

For left/right you might pan a guitar to one side, a piano chord to the other and the vocals in the center.

For forward/back you might put the vocals louder than the piano which is louder than the violins.

For up/down you might remove the guitar part during the vocal parts or remove some frequencies with EQ. Of course you have you bassline thumping away.

As with anything in life good balance of elements can result in a good experience. So think about that the next time you're mixing down a track.

How to get warez...

NFX — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 15:18:42 GMT

...would be the name of this topic if I wanted to trick you into reading it.

Really what I wanted to say is going to piss off a few of you but bear with me. I'm writing this because I want the best for you guys.

A lot of people think that using commercial software they haven't paid for (warez) is somehow justified because they don't have money or are too young to work, etc.

A lot of people who do this also say that when they can afford it, they will purchase all their software. My experience has taught me this is usually not the case.

When you remove the excuses, the bottom line is that you're stealing. and there are at least two victims.

The first victim is the maker of the software. Software developers - I happen to be one by day - work very hard to make a product that works and does what the users demand. Then they hope it brings enough money to put food on the table for the family.

A software product that sells for say $50, might come from a company that has 50 or more employees that need to be paid too.

The second victim is you. Because every time you load up that pirated copy of whatever, you are re-enforcing the fact that you don't care enough about yourself to invest in yourself.

Over time, that can really affect a person's mental attitude if that person has at least a tiny shred of morals. I'm not saying it will push you over the edge, but going legit is very liberating and you won't know how much of a burden you were carrying until you do go legit.

Many of you are going to call me crazy, but it's 100% true.

I'm not really trying to get preachy, and I still got love for all the Warbeats fam regardless, but as the mentor figure here, I have to say it.

So think about it and let's all move on.