Acid

[the stranger]

So who is using ACID? What kind of tips, tricks, and other stuff can you share with other users of this program?

 

I know some think it is just a toy, or whatever other reasons they don't like it, but it has been my temporary DAW for some time and is capable of much more than just looping.

[Lee Knight]

I used ACID as my DAW for a year or so until swiching to Pro Tools. I could make some incredibly good sounding drum performances in ACID from a single loop.

 

Have you tried isolating the individual drum hits in a loop? Try to find a kick with it's full decay and nothing else but the hat pattern. Ditto for snare. Single hat hit and... air, if you can get it.

 

Then you can pretty much create variations on your loop to create pushes into the chorus, fills, etc. Just add a found crash and you're golden.

 

Save the variations as different loops...

[the stranger]

Oh yeah, that's what I'm usually doing if I'm not just using one shots. ACID can be the ultimate drum machine, I think.

And anytime I find a good combo, yeah I save it as it's own loop.

 

One thing I would like to see in a future version of ACID is greater divsion than 64th note triplets. Soemtimes 64th note triplets just isn't enough. When doing remixes, I have had plenty of situations where even just one more level of detail below the 64th note triplets would be nice. It would save me the step of going back to Sound Forge to re-trim a sample.

[Lee Knight]

Do you ever just cut free... not to the grid. Then bring it back to the grid after the cut?

 

Another thing I did that worked out pretty cool was to use ACID as a Mellotron. I got one sample of a sustained violin and created a string arrangement behind a rock/pop tune by cutting to fit what I need and using the pitch shift for each note.

 

It was laborious but the results had an old time radio, creepy sort of vibe due to the stretching of the sample and ACID's pitchshift.

[the stranger]

 

Originally posted by Lee Knight Do you ever just cut free... not to the grid. Then bring it back to the grid after the cut?

 

 

Good idea! I have worked off the grid, but for whatever reason didn't think to bring it back after.

I should have thought of that. Because when I track into ACID, I have it do it with the save tempo/etc information. Which is great because those tracks are beatmapped and make it possible to completely rework a sequence after the fact, since the tracks you recorded are beatmapped.

[Lee Knight]

I sounds like you're doing a lot of recording into ACID. The program didn't really open up for me until I started doing that too. It really lends itself to just blowing through the tune on whatever instrument and cutting it to bits. Good bits in... bad bits out. Repeat good bits.

 

Pro Tools does this too, but ACID really lends itself to loop manipulation.

 

Have you tried slicing up a loop and reversing certain bits... like the upbeats of 1 + 3, for instance. Just an 8th note length.

[the stranger]

I'll have to give that a try!

[blue2blue]

It's funny.

 

I've been using different kinds of loops practically my whole recording life. The first, of course, were conventional tape loops. I made my first two-machine "eno" echo loop about '64 (but I didn't have much to do with it, since I didn't play music as a kid). I used loops in a soundtrack for a 16 mm film I did my first year of college. I was in a loose band for a while built around our synthesists Emulator 1 back around '84 or so. Around that same time I started making and manipulating tape loops in my old echoplex (it started when I was two cheap to buy a new tape cart for it! ). A year or two later I fooled around for a brief intense period with an early Akai rack sampler. Around '91 I started doing a live all improv echo loop show...

 

And I think the technology in ACID is really great. They (SF) were there early on ('98) with pitch shifting/time stretching that was actually usable and combined it with other technologies to make ACID the premier looping tool for years.

 

And ACID makes loop oriented production really streamlined and easy.

 

 

Which makes it sound odd, even to me, when I say, I've never really warmed up to working with ACID, though I've owned a couple versions, now. (A2 and A3Pro.)

 

Honest to gosh... I think the problem is it just makes it too easy.

 

 

One of the first things I found was that I could literally create music faster than I could listen to it...

 

... and that raises so many questions that pondering them left me little time to, you know, make any music.

 

[dahkter]

It's odd, on some level I agree with blue2blue. I remember the days of needing to pitch samples up and down so they would lay on top of the beat nicely.

Now with time stretch, you can make something so quick, it feels almost like cheating..

My favorite thing about Acid is the sound. It seems when you drive all of the volume faders up hard for each channel, it has it's own compression and fullness.

Loop record is my favorite feature, you let a loop play for an hour while you jam on top of it, grab the best part, and move on. Good stuff...

[Chris Groegler]

I used Acid when it first came out and like you guys, felt it was cheating. I still think it's too easy for anyone to create music with it, although I use it for creating drums and then import into Sonar. I'm still using version 4 and will probably upgrade when 6 comes out.

 

dahkter, funny you mention about riding the levels. I've been doing some work in Vegas 6 and noticed that if I ran the two bus about 2dB over I'd get this nice punch. I'm working with sound effects and it gives me this presence that I'm really liking. Anyone have a good explenation for this? We aren't working with tape here.

 

Chris

[Rabid]

My favorite thing is Acid is creating bass lines. You can take a few good bass loops as a foundation, then cut, clip and rearrange them into a wide variety of licks and variants. It sounds much more natural than playing them from a keyboard, and you can get away from the familiar pattern you started with. The hardest thing is keeping the timing tight with the drums. To fix that just turn off grid mode and start adjusting segments.

 

Robert

[Lee Knight]

ACID is only "easy" if you do the standard thing with it but... it can be much more than that.

 

I don't really think of ACID as a looping app anymore. I know that's what it is... but for me... it just brings me to other places that a standard pardigm audio app wouldn't.

 

I DO agree, if you just paint some loops in and start raving... well that's pretty crap. Yep.

[XXX]

would be cool if you guys could post samples of what your talking about in your post . Im new to acid and dont know much except for just dragging in a wav file and recording guitar over stuff .'

'

[acousticvoodoo]

I like and use ACID regularly.

 

Since I mainly record and mix on my Roland HD recorder, I'm usually only using ACID for final track eq, compression, and reverb effects.

 

It's also my main WAV to mp3 converter.

 

It's fun to play around with loops... but most of my music isn't done that way.

 

The beat mapping feature is great when you want to match loops with pre-recorded material. I like the ability to throw "bits" in when and where I want.

 

It's not perfect. But I can make it do most of the things I want.

 

GuitarPorter. Here's a song where I added some effects post production... I used eq, compression, enhance, and reverb.

 

Earthquake Shake

 

michael

[the stranger]

 

Originally posted by GuitarPorter would be cool if you guys could post samples of what your talking about in your post . Im new to acid and dont know much except for just dragging in a wav file and recording guitar over stuff .' '

 

 

Give me a couple of days to get a couple of clips uploaded, k?