Pro Techniques
from Ramin Sakurai
of Supreme Beings of Leisure
By Randy Alberts
"Remember, you're divine."
— from Supreme Beings of Leisure's Divine Operating
System, "Divine"
Like a creative melting pot, the Supreme Beings of Leisure collectively represent a mixing of cultures and good music. To know SBL is to love every bit of what created that whole for the band's self-titled Palm debut in 2000. For that well-received disc, they mixed one part Indian with equal parts Irish-Puerto Rican, Japanese-Iranian and Dominican Republican and blended it to sonic perfection; For Divine Operating System, the latter two ingredients are carrying on the cool trip-pop 'n' bass SBL vibe with a new collection of "Big Bond" and funky disco tracks.
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"We just represent the human culture," says multi-instrumentalist, writer and Pro Tools star Ramin Sakurai, his name a reflection of his Iranian mother and Japanese-Hawaiian father. Along with his "perfect musical complement" and fellow Being, vocalist-lyricist Geri Soriano-Lightwood from the Dominican Republic, the friendly Ramin focuses on the newly reformed duo and music in general as the "universal language. If you bring musicians who speak different languages together in a room, the resulting jam automatically becomes the chosen form of communication, automatically."
A Supreme Pro Tools Task
The remaining two Supreme Beings work together closely writing new material
with Sakurai's Pro Tools system as their creative spoke for all things
MIDI, sync, and audio. A self-termed "moderately heavy MIDI user,"
he MIDI-composed, recorded, edited, produced, and mixed all of Divine
Operating System within his preferred platform.
To
get a feel for what SBL sounds like, picture what a band with Bjork, Sly
and the Family Stone, and James Bond would sound like and you're halfway
there. Soriano-Lightwood's enchanting voice is the narrative and sounds
like Shirley Bassey on trip-hop and pop, and she's excited about the new
set of vibes she's playing on the band's Divine Operating System
tour.
A graduate of the Institute of Audio Video Engineering in Hollywood who earlier studied bass and music synthesis at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Sakurai is plenty wise about both sides of the board. He's been a Pro Tools user since before there was a Pro Tools (he used the Pro 01), so his natural technical dexterity with Pro Tools allows Sakurai more time than ever before to explore the diverse creative talents and songwriting tools at his disposal.
"I wanted to bring in some of my Iranian heritage on this record so I hired a santur [distant cousin to the hammered dulcimer] player for one track," Sakurai says of "Rock and a Hard Place" from DOS. "My mom's great musician friends have come over here to Los Angeles from Tehran and other parts of Iran for years. She actually hooked me up with a tar player [six-string banjo-/mandolin-like instrument] for the first SBL record and a santur player for this new one. I love the sound of the santur and have always wanted to play one myself. That guy was fantastic, he just nailed it."
Sakurai's current Digidesign system consists of a Pro Tools|24 MIXplus system with an 888|24 I/O and three DSP Farm cards in a Magma expansion chassis. With Divine Operating System released, the next Supreme Beings of Leisure project is already well under way, proving you can't keep a good songwriting duo with Pro Tools down for long. Plans for the next one? "Yes, I have a whole new set of programming ideas I'm working with now that will be a lot different from our first two records. And Geri's thinking of singing in Spanish on the next album! We went to a salsa club the other night and the rhythms hit us real hard."
Pro Technique 1 —
Shaping up those lazy loop points with Pitch 'n Time
Sakurai needed to pitch a particular conga loop used on a couple of
Divine Operating System songs and place it just a bit out of time
for feel, so he turned to Serato's Pitch 'n Time plug-in to pitch and
time-expand the loop. Working closely with loops is essential for the
SBL sound but only after said loops are locked as deep as Davey Jones'
locker.
"When it comes to loop points, a lot of Digi 001 users I work with
bring their original tracks in here to me and they're guessing and trying
to get the loops close," Sakurai notes. "They'll just go to
the timeline, see how long a loop is and where it ends and then try to
create a new loop point using the actual time, as opposed to using the
BPM. They're usually off by a few ticks, so I always can hear all the
noisy transitions that don't match the pitch or the time of the song."
He sometimes uses Beat Detective to doctor said offending loops but says
home-brewed loops are often stretched or compressed so far beyond recognition
that a couple of transients may still be off when there's a lot of swing.
"After trimming the loop points perfectly on the down beat of the
1's, I then select that region of the loop and click Identify Beat in
the edit window or by pressing Command/Ctrl + I. This provides
the actual tempo of the selected loop that appears in the top of the edit
window next to the Minutes/Seconds, Bars:Beats, Timecode, and other readouts.
Don't forget to undo this command or press Command/Ctrl + Z afterwards
because you don't want that other tempo in your session. Now, with this
loop tempo in mind, I then open the Serato Pitch 'n Time plug-in and enter
that into the input BPM box and then enter the tempo of the song in the
output BPM box. By the way, this is an optimal time to do any tuning of
the loop or the song, as well."
Pro Technique 2 —
Tabbing through transients
To perform his cuts when creating a new loop, Sakurai first clicks on
the small Tab to Transients button in the far top left of the Pro Tools
edit palette next to the A-Z button and then presses the Tab key to move
the song position pointer instantly from transient to transient. This
move saves him plenty of time during each session simply by not having
to grab for the mouse to scrub a loop in achieving the same task.
"Sometimes time compression/expansion isn't necessary with certain
percussion and drum loops, you just need a little editing and shifting,"
continues the ever-helpful Being. "Let's say it's a drum loop with
kick-snare, kick-snare. Tab to Transients will go straight to the beginning
of the kick, then to the snare, then to the next kick or hi-hat or whatever
is next in your loop. This move saves me a ton of time. I just go Tab
B, Tab B, and so forth and Pro Tools then does all my cuts
quickly for me. Also, sometimes I have to find the zero point and relocate
manually to get it perfectly, but this function is good for quick editing
and it gets close to the zero point most of the time."
Sakurai also explains that sometimes the above method may skip a beat
when a transient's peak is too small. He finds this method often a bit
cleaner for this than using Beat Detective's Edit mode but explains below
how he does use it best.
"I'll then move all these little pieces around, too. It's great if you've got a good stereo drum and/or rhythm section loop but there's a couple of hits that conflict with what's going on musically there. This is a quick way to go right in there, isolate the beats you want out, and just do Command/Ctrl + M to mute transients or delete each altogether."
Ramin also adds: "You can also time stretch, compress, or tune individual
hits or simply replace certain hits within a loop as much as you can with
ReCyle using MIDI programming. You can also quantize those regions that
make up the loop by first selecting the regions you want quantized, then
hitting Quantize Regions in the edit window. Once I have my desired new
multi-regioned loop, I can go back into Beat Detective and smooth out
the loop by selecting all the loop regions and perform Edit Smoothing.
This inserts crossfades at all the edit points. Now, you use Consolidate
Selection by selecting the newly cross-faded regions and hitting Consolidate
Selection in the edit windows. Finally, you select the section and keep
pressing Command/Ctrl + D to your heart's content. All these methods
are just quicker ways of editing your loops."
Pro Technique 3 —
Determining delay, multi-tap, and pre-delay times the old-fashioned way
Tempo-locked effects processors and a handful of shareware utilities
are handy for syncing BPM-based time effects within a song. When neither
is available, there's a solution formula that's been on the planet perhaps
longer than anyone reading this story. First, revive your old calculator
(or open it on your computer desktop) then grab a pencil, eraser, and
paper. Now, listen to "Give Up" from Divine Operating System
to hear best how Sakurai makes good use of tempoed effects, and then proceed.
"This is a formula engineers have used for years to figure their delay times according to tempo. I especially like it when producing vocals," says Sakurai, who should know after the depth of his recording and production schooling and musical experience since his Berklee days. "Instead of just tapping out the delay time and trying to get it close by ear, there's a way you can do it on a calculator by dividing 60,000 into the BPM to get the quarter note for the delay time."
Sakurai says to simply multiply by two to find a half note value, do the same by three to find triplets, and to multiply that number by two for establishing half note triplet values.
"Let's say the BPM is 120. Well, that's 500 milliseconds per quarter note, so if you want half notes you multiply by two, which is 1,000 milliseconds, or one second. For eighth notes, you divide it by two, which is 250 milliseconds, and so forth. If you want triplets you just divide the 500 by three and that'll be 166.666, then you can multiply that by two to get your half note triplet. That's how you find out and then set your tempo-based delay times."
The Pro Tools go-to guy for the Supreme Beings of Leisure's new Divine Operating System who handled all things audio on his MIXplus from his home studio in Westwood, California, Ramin Sakurai adds even more goodness about the power of the calculator in closing. "When I use the [Digidesign] Long Delay plug-in, sometimes I'll combine a dotted quarter with a quarter. So one side of the delay is at a quarter note setting and the other tap on the right will be a dotted quarter. Then I just experiment with the dry/delay mix and feedback controls to create a very, very nice delay that's perfectly in time with the tempo of the track. Another cool thing about this tip is that you can time a pre-delay on the LexiVerb or any reverb processor with it. That's what gives a snare or hand claps that nice 'Ummm-kaahhhhh' coming up to a break or transition in a song."
- 60,000 divided by BPM = quarter note
- quarter note X 2 = half note
- quarter note X 3 = dotted half note
- quarter note X 4 = whole note
- quarter note divided by 2 = 8th note
- quarter note divided by 4 = 16th note
- quarter note X 1.5 = dotted quarter note (or divide dotted half note by 2)
- dotted quarter divided by 2 = dotted 8th note
- dotted quarter divided by 4 = dotted 16th (or divide dotted half by 8 or dotted 8th by 2)
- quarter note divided by 3 = 8th note triplets
- quarter note divided by 1.5 = quarter note triplets (or multiply 8th triplets by 2)
- quarter note divided by 6 = 16th note triplets (or divide 8th triplets by 2)