Bringing Final Fantasy Music To Life With a Band

Greetings. Today I'm going to talk about how  I take kind of janky, terrible-sounding midi arrangements and turn them into something  a bit more realized and fat-sounding. In this video I'm basically going to go through  how I turned this [Music] into this [Music] I'm not really sure if this is a tutorial or  just me sort of talking about a final fantasy project that I've been working on because I  want to, but I still think for anybody who's kind of like a home musician and wanting to  record s

tuff in Logic and make full songs that you'd be happy releasing, and also how to  kind of turn those into something that you can actually play with a real band or other people,  I think there'll be some pretty useful information potentially in this video for people who aren't  necessarily interested in Final Fantasy music. I've just put out an album of stuff that is like  this and if you've seen any of my other videos, it's basically combining everything that  I talk about and use all together,

but in actual proper music that you can hear through  the vessel of Final Fantasy stuff, I guess. So what exactly is the point of all of this?  well yeah basically as a introduction to this Final Fantasy project of mine, my aim is  basically to create a tribute band performing music from Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX  live, but in some kind of more contemporary ways - combining sounds from genres like rock  and metal, electronic/IDM, experimental music, sort of more moder jazz fusion and Hip-Ho

p  and stuff, and kind of like smooshing it all together with Final Fantasy music as kind  of like the Bedrock of that, essentially. The idea is to play some of the tracks in  a more contemporary tekkers and fun style to kind of highlight some of the cool rhythms  and enhance some of the really cool melodies, or some of what I think are really  really cool melodies on the soundtracks. I absolutely love the music of these games  by Nobuo Uematsu and I've always kind of wanted to do a band like th

is or a project  like this, but I've only recently felt like I've actually really got the skills to be  able to pull it off, so I am now doing it. So if you're not really like familiar with what the deal is with Final Fantasy  music here is a quick history lesson! Back in the day, PlayStation 1 discs could  only store about 700MB of data or so. Because the Final Fantasy games were pretty big, what  that essentially meant was you couldn't store high-quality audio files like wavs on the CD,  becau

se it would just take up too much space which was obviously needed for the rest of the game. So  to kind of get around that technical limitation, the composer did everything as MIDI, and I think  what's basically happening when you're playing the game is you're not hearing a recording of music  that you would normally traditionally expect, but it's just MIDI files or instruments that are  I guess are built-in to the PlayStation hardware. The long and short of what that  means is on the original

soundtrack, there's no recorded instruments - it's all just  realized with software stuff and I absolutely love the sound of it personally, I  find it really charming and kind of, I love the the janky 90s mid Rompler sound of  those soundtracks - I think they have such a specific quality and texture because of the era  and the technology that they used. I don't know, somehow despite that for me they still are  quite like uh timeless and interesting. Something that I just find fascinating and  ob

viously a lot of other people do is 'what would those sound like if they were brought  to life with real musicians?' and this has obviously been done a lot by orchestras and other  cover musicians. But just for me personally, I've never quite heard anything kind of do it  in the ways that I've imagined hearing it and kind of taking influences from more sort of  contemporary artists, rather than thinking about it like soundtrack music, I think is  kind of the way I like to think about it. So my p

rocess for doing this uh kind of starting  with a janky midi song and turning it into a live thing breaks down into a few steps and I'm going  to cover all of those in a little bit of detail in this video, but more separately in later videos  - but this is it just quickly kind of broken down. So part one of my process is to download  a midi file created by somebody else, for whatever song it is that I want to  cover, and uh that will basically give me some information that I need like some of  t

he notes or chords for parts, and then I work out how to play things on guitar or keys  myself by referencing uh other people's midi. Then essentially what I do is  create a project which is just meant to emulate the original  song as closely as possible, without any kind of additions or alterations  - so I first try and focus on getting it to sound nostalgic and like the original versions  of each song pretty much as accurately as I can. Third part of it is I then start basically  embellishing

that with my own stuff, like adding more complicated drum parts, guitar  and bass riffs, other synths and like electronic programming and some of my DOOMy bass sounds, just  to kind of like enhance the melody and the grooves and I kind of create different interpretations  of genres for each track kind of depending on what the sort of emotional style of the original  song is or what the purpose of it is, I suppose. So for example the 'Opening Bombing Mission';  I've done that in kind of more of l

ike a Metalcore style, and uh kind of yeah industrial synth  sounds and stuff like that like the sort of DOOM 2016 soundtrack, and the reason for that  is because that song has kind of got like this, uh it's got this quite sinister melody this  sinister riff that's cycling through it in triplets, and um it's like the introduction  to the game so it's meant to have this quite kind of like 'momentous' and epic feel to it, so  I've made it quite lively and more aggressive. But in other places on th

e album  where things were meant to be a little bit maybe more like delicate or  emotional, I've gone for softer genres like like Post-Rock and Hip-Hop and stuff  like that, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. So then basically once I've  finished producing the track, I then figure out how I'm going to convert  that into an Ableton Live session and start basically figuring out how I'm going  to make the version that I've produced performable in a live context, and I'll  kind of go into that in a littl

e bit. And then yeah, once that's done I basically  rehearse this like mad, and then do that also with the band; we all sort of like learn it in  our own time then bring it together and yeah. It's on - we stop on the 4. 1-2-3-4-1-bah-bah-bah The first step is: as a reference, you can  download midi files of most of these songs uh pretty easily from Google, so um yeah if  I just do, if you just do a Google search for Final Fantasy midi um you can find websites  such as this one like Kingdom Heart

s Insider and you will find long lists of uh MIDI files  that are created by other fans and musicians um and they kind of vary in accuracy and some  of them are programmed a little bit strangely, and if I want to grab say  for example 'Battle Theme', there's a bunch of versions here, so  I'm going to try just 'Battle Theme 6'. So this is the Battle Theme in Logic, and when  you download a midi file and open it up in Logic like this you can see that it basically because  of the information in tha

t midi file, Logic has automatically assigned a bunch of instruments  to the parts that are kind of like close or 'exactly' what that instrument is meant to be,  but you will notice obviously to begin with: So yeah, I mean uh obviously it sounds  rubbish, erm, sounds like fake terrible midi that I don't think anybody would  spend very much time listening to. So it's kind of cool, like it's got, like  it is cool the fact that you've got some of these sounds automatically assigned to  it, but basi

cally I am only using this as like a reference for getting some of  the notes and what some of the parts are, because yeah a lot of the times um people  don't exactly get things exactly right. For example, I know that in this  midi version there's something wrong, so [Music] so like yeah for example, in this bit  of programming here - this section - that is, that is wrong. That is not the melody. Uh  so what that actually does, hang on a sec let's go to Spotify -- so you can hear like  in this v

ersion, that's like a vague kind of interpretation of what's actually happening  in the proper track, so um yeah, these are only sort of really useful to me as a vague  reference of what some of the parts are doing. So yeah pretty much the way that I would start  going about this is like have a listen through, and the initial thing that I would do um is tidy  up some of this midi, so it's not just, um there's a lot of like weird volume automation and stuff  happening and some weird panning, and

you can see that that's just basically causing my Stereo  Out to clip and everything's just a bit mad. The other thing to do is I'm going to make  some decisions about what exactly I'm going to keep and what I'm going to replace. I  would chuck out all the kind of like janky, terrible-sounding things, or stuff that  doesn't even really need to be there, um and then what I would do is basically  like learn the parts by looking at the notes here but then actually work it out on  keyboard or guitar

and then play it back in. The place that I am usually starting with all of these cover versions and  these demo versions is the drums. So it's basically like once I've  programmed the drums as the foundation, that is going to be half my battle won,  and then I'm going to use that as like my bedrock to record everything  else over the top of it later. But you'll hear the way that I can program  the drums will really affect kind of like the mood and the feel, and like yeah the  genre-vibe of each

track. I can actually really determine what that's going to be, pretty  much purely through the drums and how the drums are like orchestrated and performed. So um  I'll sort of show you what I mean by that. So I don't have an example of it for Battle Theme  but this is a little sneak preview of my upcoming Final Fantasy VIII material - I had the foresight  to record myself or screen-capture my entire process sequencing the drums for a cover version  of "Under Her Control" from Final Fantasy VII

I. So I've now switched to- I'm doing voice  over here just to kind of comment on this, I recorded this footage quite a few  months ago so yeah I'm just kind of going to do a little commentary  basically over the top of it. But yeah this is how I've been starting each one  of these covers, so as you can hear I kind of get the sounds of the software instruments  as close as I can to the original tracks, or sort of with this one it's like I've got them  roughly close so that they sound kind of oka

y. And then I start programming the drums  basically. So instead of programming a loop and then stretching that out for  the whole song and adding things to the uh different sections of the loop, um I've been  finding with this process I've been getting much more natural results if I program the entire  song by hand on a moment-to-moment basis, and I've just been finding that I  can get really creative with the fills and enhancing the overall punch and the  grooves of each track by doing it this

way. And yeah it took me about 50 minutes to an hour  to program this entire track's worth of drums, I'm pretty sure, um and yeah I just  find that that like that simple act of the initial laying down of hits is really  exciting and it's a fun creative process kind of going through the whole song and making  the drum part that way. um for me, anyway. So yeah the amount of time that it can take  will sort of vary depending on how inspired you're feeling or how fun you think it is,  but um yeah I

personally don't think it'd be that interesting to watch 50 minutes  or so of me doing this so I've just done a little quick montage-edit here showing  how I compare things to the original track to make sure that I'm nailing all the drum  phrasings right, and getting some sort of 'key' stuff in from the original before  I add anything or divert in my own way. But yeah if anybody would be interested in  watching the entire video and just seeing my process of how I did this un-edited, uh do  let

me know, but yeah I don't imagine that would be that interesting to that many  people so I've just left that out here. So yeah and obviously you can hear probably  like if I play you a full example of what that sounds like, um the full song  with the programmed drums on it now This really does the trick for me and it's like  half the battle won, I think because you can hear that like that drum arrangement and the drum  sound, um it just does so much to kind of inject interest to the original arr

angement and kind  of keep it fresh as it moves along, but it's actually kind of like done something to bolster up  those kind of um, should we say like, midi sounds, I suppose - those cheap software instrument  emulations of real things um actually sort of it's starting to come alive a little bit, and  now as soon as I start adding in more layers of real instruments like my guitar and bass -- even  though this is all software instruments, as soon as I add those two quote-unquote organic things 

to it, it's going to suddenly really come to life so we're going to dip back into Battle Theme So this is my own project file for  Battle Theme and you can see how I've kind of arranged everything, and  I will sort of just go through it um and kind of break down what's happening  with each layer or what each thing is. so this is what I consider to be  un-mixed, all I've got on the Stereo Out is a Gain insert just to stop anything  um getting too loud and uh going over 0.0dB. so at the top here

you've got the drums,  and these are coming from Addictive Drums, and I've talked about this in a different  video this is kind of like my baseline default kit setup that I've been using  for these Cactuar Collections albums. Yeah so I've mentioned it before, but yeah it's  got like um, it's mostly sounds and kit pieces that come from the Metal pack - but whilst  they've obviously got this rad-as-[ __ ] uh flaming Metal graphics and they look metal as  [ __ ], I actually think they're more diver

se and malleable than that than many of the  other kits and you can kind of make them work for a lot of different genres, in my  opinion; they don't just work for metal. Like the um Under Her Control part, I've  literally programmed this by you know, I don't program like a loop and then  work from that way with this project, it's literally I create a region is the whole  length of the song and then go through and pretty much click in each one of these hits individually,  and I just find that lik

e doing it that way you make a more realistic and dynamic-sounding drum  part that is actually more like a real drummer, because you just don't end up copy-pasting.Llike  when you're programming the drums on like a moment-to-moment basis throughout the song, I  find that it gives you just this really cool ability to mess about with fills um and just  like play about with dynamics and stuff in a way that -- not that you can't do that if you're  like sat at a real kit and practicing, but I just fi

nd it very different programming drums and  listening back to what the fills are doing, versus actually doing it on a real kit. I find  I don't listen in the same way if I'm playing, so I find this like a really interesting writing  tool, even though I could probably -- well I'm actually not good enough at drums to play these  parts either, but let's forget about that :D again with this song, because it's one of the  ones that's quite high-energy and kind of like, it's the Battle Theme, right, s

o it's got this  quite up-tempo high-energy feel to it, and I thought it'd just be interesting to hear that done  in kind of like Metalcore/Electronic Rock vibe, um and I was pretty inspired by basically like  Architects and bands like Three Trapped Tigers. with Architects in particular I'm thinking of like  uh the Tom Searle era and I am 99.9% sure that Tom Searle was a massive fan of Final Fantasy 7, so in  a way this is sort of like my kind of like tribute to him, as well as Nobuo Uematsu. Bu

t yeah that's  kind of where I'm coming at with this right. As a result of that, I've also kind of arranged  stuff in this track a little bit differently, so that it can be played on guitars [Music]  uh then you've basically got all the uh Percussion tracks. so these aren't coming  from anything special at all, these are all just like built-in Logic instruments. So  if I solo- so that's the tambourine part And yeah like when I've been making these,  I've been pretty pretty much consistently hopp

ing backwards and forwards  between you know (the OG versions) [Music] I kind of want every detail of it to  be accurate to what was going on in the original before I start adding  things and you can kind of hear; So those are the timpanis, which is  also this is all you know these are all just coming from logic instruments and  they don't have any plug-in processing, or any compression or anything on them.  There's these toms that are seperate. I think to be honest these sounds in  isolation wo

uld sound a little bit crap, but because they're layered in with Addictive  Drums too I think it's managed to blag it and it actually kind of sounds like, um that actually  sounds alright to me as a percussion section, at least with no mixing or mastering done to it. The tones in particular sound uh pretty realistic,  and then there are three more tracks here which are basically like these one-off incidental  effects tracks. This is a reverse cymbal whoosh that I've shown before how to make, lit

erally  just a reverse cymbal and you get that kind of -- and then here is like a  couple of impact sounds, so I think that is actually just from a sample pack  that I have of just like splashy effects kicks, and then this is like a -- that's like a sub  drop from one of my Reaktor synths, and you don't really, I don't know, kind of you don't hear  it but you kind of sort of feel it, I suppose. At this point with all of these, with most of  these Final Fantasy 7 Nobuo Uematsu tracks, they just b

asically, the whole arrangement  is that long -- but then it loops twice, basically, and pretty much my formula for  these covers has been for the first half I want it to be faithful for the most  part, or uh less heavy and less detail, or like less of my own additional detail in the  first half - and then when it gets to the second half is when I really start going pretty nuts and  adding different variations, more layers and just heavy-ing up what's going on, basically. So that's  pretty much

the formula of all these tracks. And yeah I just find that these like little  effects here do a thing to establish the 'reset' of that loop, so that you know that  it's going to kind of get a bit heavier this time around, psychologically in  a sort of subtle way, hopefully. So then you've got the 5-string Bass midi, and  um I always kind of program bass parts and stuff with my acoustic drums before I even bother  getting it out of the case and recording it. Again I just really like programming t

hings  as midi because it's just I listen differently uh when I'm programming it in here, compared  to when I'm actually playing the instrument. I find it really helps for knowing if my ideas are even going to work before I bother to  try and record it, if that makes sense. So the sound from this, let me show you, is  uh again it's just a Logic Sampler instrument, and this doesn't really matter cuz  I'm going to replace it later anyway, but just to show the one that I  think is best for this it'

s the uh Sampler > Bass > Electric Bass and I like  "Session Bass". I've got Neural DSP Parallax on that just to make it sound like a, you  know sort of driven Metalcore sort of vibe. I kind of use this as my uh, this is like  my tab, basically. so once I sort of-- with the drums -- so yeah it's basically  from that that I'll then learn the bass part and record it in on a real bass,  which improves the sound massively. Moving down to this chunk of tracks  here that are all in orange, these are t

he synth tracks and basically what's  going on here just to quickly explain it, It's all the kind of I think the hookiest  and catchiest parts of the strings and brass sections from the original track, and what  I've essentially done is uh re-arranged these parts and condensed them down for three synth  players. So I'm kind of trying to make what a whole brass section and a whole string section  are doing, uh emulating that with three people. And it's like I'm not sure if you'll hear  it, but we

haven't necessarily got all the melodies or all the call & response, but I think  we've got the most important ones in there. And the other thing is like even at this stage,  I'm trying to think about the logistics of how we would actually play this song live, um for  example each keyboardist I think would have like, we often have two keyboards each, for example,  and you've got to think about the logistics of somebody being able to get their hands  from one place to another quickly enough, and

in some cases with these melodies, the way  it's arranged, it's like that's actually really [ __ ] difficult and you need a larger orchestra  or more people to kind of help you with that. I've arranged the parts so that it gives each  other sort of time and rests to kind of stop and then come back in, and like for example if  somebody has to stop playing a melody like a lead synth to get to the keys part, somebody else  in the band takes over that line from them, and I think that way you kind o

f get this interesting  kind of call & response thing happening [Music] I'm mainly using a synth called Fabfilter  One and it's just on like a Sawtooth setting, just to kind of give it that lik,e  I think it's still video-gamey but I think that kind of synth sound can also  make it kind sound kind of Squarepusher-y, or Three Trapped Tigers-esque and  I think that blends together really well with like the heavy guitars and  all of that kind of nonsense, right. So it sounds appropriate to what the

  strings and brass were doing originally, but it now kind of fits in a context  for like a smaller rock band, I guess. next down here are these Green guitar  tracks and basically these are like my demo or rough recordings. I kind  of do an initial pass in this midi project just to sort of try out  some ideas and see if they sound any good. So yeah guitar tones for this  are all coming from Neural DSP plugins. And you've got this um sort of Rhythm track,  which is like uh this is what Adam's pla

ying in the video basically, these two L&R tracks  here that are double-tracked. Yeah again so this riff is like, it's incorporating various  different parts of the original arrangement amalgamated for guitar, right. So it's like  there's parts from the brass, that's in there, but then there's also the synth lead parts  are now sort of incorporated on the guitar, as like a Djenty lower-pitched metal riff,  so it's kind of trying to emulate different parts of that larger orchestral arrangement, 

but just on the one instrument, essentially. yeah again sort of the vibe that I'm going for  with that is uh kind of sounding like basically bit like Architects or the Fall of Troy, um and  yeah just kind of stuff like that essentially. So next two tracks below that are my parts,  um and this is like a lead tapping riff. Again it's basically it's inspired by uh  the Fall of Troy and Architects, again, that kind of [ __ ]. But um I thought,  this part isn't actually in the original song at all an

d I've just made it up and  put it in here, but what it's doing is it's obviously like emulating what the main  Topline Melody for each section is doing, and it's like I think it's hopefully not too  intrusive and distracting, or like doesn't get in the way of the original song but kind of helps it,  still further cements it in this new context of, I guess like I don't know what you call  it, math-rocky metalcore [ __ ] I guess Then the next two tracks here are my  kind of Djenty guitar tracks r

ight, and these are using uh Archetype: Petrucci again, because it's got that Transpose function in it  so I can basically turn my six-string guitar into what is ostensibly an eight-string,  or get that kind of Baritone guitar sound. And this riff is basically, it's just doing  exactly what Adam's playing and John on the bass, as I mentioned earlier yeah the second time  this big chorus happens I essentially just want it to get heavier, and a way to do that is  just to then layer in this guitar

djenty part, and I think as a performance maybe  it's kind of cool because - hang on if I delete that, because that's  not meant to be how it is -- For the first half of the song I'm playing lead  synth, and I'm doing most stuff on keyboards, and then it's just quite fun for me to be able  to change which instrument I'm playing mid-song, so once you get to this section I can  then start joining on guitar, basically. And just to kind of further illustrate what  happens there because we don't have

enough members or enough people in the band to play all  the parts live, essentially what happens is that synth part that I was playing gets transferred  to my little Pocket Piano synth that I've shown before and then that is playing lead synt line  for the parts where I'm playing it on guitar. So it's kind of is still happening live, but  obviously the midi is being sent to a synth and it's just taken care of it for me for the  bits where I'm using both hands to play guitar. Just to give you a

little  idea of what that sounds like Yeah so it's basically just giving it a  little bit more aggression and a bit more impact um on this second version of this chorus  riff, I suppose. think [Music] I've [Music] so yeah without it -- and with it -- Obviously that's meant to be  emulating the whole uh [Music] so yeah now it's - I don't know, I think it's kind of fun. Then the remainder of these tracks, all of these  here, are basically the um, these are the original strings and brass parts rig

ht, arranged, and  they live pretty quietly in the mix, quite quiet. so that is like the janky midi sound, um but  I've instead of using- some of the Logic default things are okay, but you can see that I've  like replaced some of these instruments with other- yeah I've replaced these instruments with  other like slightly uh better-sounding software instruments basically. Spitfire Audio's LABS  collection has got some really good stuff in it. And yeah all of these sort of like layered together un

derneath these  synths so it's quite subtle You can just kind of hear that like they're  behind the synths, but they kind of fatten everything up a little bit. And then yeah  you've got the same kind of thing going on here That's a good trick, often its just  layering a few software instrument patches together that are doing  the same thing can actually make them sound pretty fat.So for example that  that strings part, if I just grab that. Yeah on its own it's obviously not really that  great, o

r it might be okay if you put a bunch of compression and stuff on it, but yeah it  just sounds quite MIDI I guess and fake, but yeah just putting a few more layers on that I  think can kind of help make it sound a lot better and a bit of reverb of course, something like  Valhalla VintageVerb is always nice to have. Pretty much all of this will end up as  backing tracks in my Ableton project right, so um the rest of it is all stuff that  we're actually going to play for real on real instruments a

nd we'll have to learn  it as a band, but all of this stuff kind of sits in the Ableton project and it's  something that we would play to in a live context just kind of like to fatten  out the actual parts that we're playing. I'm kind of leaning towards like- I'm trying to  use backing tracks in this project as little as possible, so doing most of the heavy lifting  by actually doing it on real instruments and having to learn stuff for real is kind of mostly  what I'm doing with this project, ba

sically. Once I'm happy with how I've got everything  sounding and recorded in my arrangement, I then basically convert this project into  audio and then I start my Mix project file. So for example yeah the drums I would Bounce  out as an individual file, and then I would go through and do the Tambo, Toms, Timps and just  yeah every track becomes its own audio file; some things get grouped and summed down together and  then I basically move over to uh my mix project. Okay this is my final Mix fi

le, uh my final  mix project in Logic for Battle Theme. I'm doing a another voice-over here because  unfortunately again, this is old footage that I've recorded that I'm going to have to narrate  over, but yeah essentially this part of my process is once I'm happy with everything from the *Logic  MIDI project, I convert it all to audio and then I put it in here in a blank session. Some of those  software instruments and stuff can be quite a drain on the CPU, just to make sure I've got my  full C

PU power available to me for adding more plugins to do mixing processing and stuff like  that, I've just committed everything to audio. The only things that stay as midi  are the Addictive Drums part, and that's so that I can open up Addictive  Drums and still kind of tweak the drum mix and stuff quite late into the day, so that's  something that I haven't committed to, and I still have the Neural DSP plugins active in  this session on the DI bass and guitar tracks, um and that enables me to sti

ll tweak the tones  and not necessarily like commit to them, because they've not been bounced to audio, so I can still  kind of tweak those things down the line right. Admittedly with this project I'm not doing a huge  amount of processing to anything individually, so there's basically no EQ or compression or anything  happening on individual tracks for the most part, which obviously looks a bit weird for a mix, but  um I have done some I always route things to Bus Groups um and do a little bit

of processing,  but there's really not a lot going on in this one and in this instance it's most of the kind of  like "Mix" stuff that you're hearing is actually just happening on the Master, um on the master  channel, so I pretty much put a bunch of plugins on the Stereo Out and apply it to everything at  once, rather than doing so much individual work. And I found that with these tracks I've  kind of been able to get away with it, just because my starting- what I've  recorded already sounds re

ally good, there's less of a need to fix things  because they already sound kind of good, which would be different if I recorded the drums  entirely acoustically for real, there'd be a lot work to do on those raw mic recordings to  sound as good as it would do, basically, but because of what I've used it's just kind of  negated that, which is quite interesting I think. And yeah you can see in this project I've  also added sounds from the original track that I managed to source authentically off 

of my EMU Proteus 2000 -- so for example that like trashy kind of 'CKHHH' sound that  you can hear uh in the original um IS here, and I've actually sourced that without nicking  it from the original game, basically. So um yeah I think that's kind of uh, my USP possibly  with this, but I think that's kind of cool. Now yeah obviously as I get into this more,  unfortunately my uh, this mix session is, I did this on my old Mac which is a 2012 iMac, which has  recently pretty much died - it really c

an't handle doing a screen capture whilst playing the mix file  in real time with all the plugins, um as you can see CPU just craps out and it's really uh, I just  basically can't record it much or show you much of this in detail, which kind of sucks, so from now  on I'm going to be doing everything on my newer Mac M1 cuz it will actually be able to handle it  and I'll be able to show you stuff in more detail. But yeah basically at the moment that's  what's going on. You can sort of see a little

bit my Master Bus there, so it looks  like quite a lot but all of these plugins are kind of doing small things incrementally  that add up, and yeah the Acustica Amber EQ is basically just doing a lot of like top  end EQ (20Khz Boost for 'Air'), um there's a bit of Compression and then some Limiting  and Clipping but there's not really a huge amount going on, but I'll go into this  all in more detail in a separate video. Right so uh I've just nipped into my Ableton project which is the full live

Ableton  project for the Final Fantasy 7 album, you can see literally every track is arranged  in here, and before I go back to the Session Ciew I'll just give you a quick tour of  basically what's going on with my setup, So I've got a bunch of Groups here,  so this is my Instruments Group, and you can see I've got some some stuff on  it - good old Beat Repeat - I won't be able to show you what that does at the moment, but  basically if I open that up there's a bunch of tracks in here right and

this first  one which is called LX61 pertains to my- so um, that's just my uh, that's my  keyboard, right so this track just corresponds to everything that's  happening on my MIDI keyboard. If I go into that, you'll see I've got  an Instrument Rack and these are all the plugins and every synth that I use  for the whole, the entire set right, so these are all the instruments that  are going to appear in all the songs. And you can basically see that um some of them  are off and some of them are o

n, and uh through the power and the beauty of Automation I've  basically got this all set up so that for example, if I click "Under the Rotting Pizza" you can see  there that everything just changed to give me- and if I for example change back to "Shinra  Inc." or let's change to another song, So it's pretty useful because basically yeah,  whenever I start a particular song I know that my keyboard and all of its effects settings and  stuff have basically set themselves to exactly where I need th

em to be, see you can hear that  that's got delay on it there and now I've got a Rhodes sound that has no delay on it, so  it's just really really useful for having everything ready and because I'm using quite a  lot of kit, it's just saving my brain a lot of headache remembering to turn certain things  on and off. So I think that's pretty useful, and that's happening basically on every  instrument that I've got in in the project, right. So moving on to the next track is the guitar  and this is

my Guitar Channel. And yeah similar again where I'm using an Audio Effect Rack and  I've got these three, I've got all my Neural DSP guitar plugins loaded up because I use  different plugins for different tones live, and you can see that these turn themselves off  and on at different points when I need them to. So for example Battle Theme, cuz I'm going for  the heavy tones you see I switch to Archetype: Petrucci for that song, and obviously within  the songs as well there's more like automation

happening, so for example I might have  like a Dry/Wet FX kind of turn itself up at a particular point in the track where I need  it to, um or the Transpose function will change itself when I want to have my eight-string /  pseudo-eight-string guitar versus the normal six-string, so it just offers a lot of kind  of cool creative flexibility and fun stuff. So you can also automate- for when the guitar's  not in use, I obviously don't want it feeding back or making any sound, so again in certain

songs  where I don't want the guitar to be heard it can just be Off and then it comes on specifically  when I need it to. Let me show you, actually. So yeah for example if I change to a different  song like 'Lurking in the Darkness' -- uh and yeah and for example so I can't possibly  make any noise, uh I can't trip myself up by turning the volume knob down and forgetting  that I've done that, um yeah that can happen. So So yeah for me, that's just like, I find  that awesome and really really use

ful So that you can hear a bit of the  eight-string action engaging itself. So I think that's prettyyy siiiiiick Then basically this next track here is  the Pocket Piano, these are all the notes that are getting sent to my synth and yeah, I  won't be able to show that right now so I'll do this in a separate video, but you can see for  example, the keys part of 'The Nightmare Begins', the whole thing just gets sent to my Pocket  Piano and that basically means that I ca do some messing about with

that to kind of get  some synthesized sounds at certain points, if I want to, at any point in the song I can  kind of turn that up and get something out of it. "Pad Percs" is a bunch of drum machine sounds  that I have assigned to my Launchpad, so I can kind of trigger those you know whenever,  I thought there was some more in here, but - oh here we are, 'Launchpad Drums'  - oh yeah, I've also got a bunch of- And yeah like- so I can like, you know,  I can hit a pad on the Launchpad and that will

actually trigger in  real time, which is pretty fun. Next up is 'Reaktor FX', so I have this running  at all times in my project and um again I have this assigned to my Korg NanoKontrol, so  I can kind of turn that up whenever and I can do some like nice little kind of like  ambient delay fillers and stuff like that, which is quite a nice thing to  have to sort of fiddle with. And then yeah this section here, this  Group is all the Backing Tracks basically, just everything that is in the origin

al song so  I can come in and turn on the Addictive Drums and then yeah because it's obviously all  programmed exactly to specific BPMs and it's all on the grid like this, this basically  enables the possibility to send a MIDI Clock out of Ableton to, for example, my visuals guy  who's doing lights; pretty easy to get a midi clock into other programs for visuals to get  those synchronized and doing some tight stuff with the music, and that's all possible from  you know a simple rig like this whi

ch I think is pretty [ __ ] sweet right, it's my entire-  basically my guitar rig so, it's like my guitar effects and my amp, it's my keyboard/synths  and loads of stuff baked into the keyboard, and then I'm also able to kind of send click  tracks out to a band, which I'll show you, where are those- So these are my own in-ear  monitoring tracks, so I've got the backing tracks and the feed of my own instruments and I can set  different levels for those for everybody else, so if somebody wants a l

ittle bit less of me, they  can have less of me, and then down here is a Group of Recording Tracks and they basically just  record everything happening live, so if I want to record a performance that I'm doing I can just  hit Record and everything ends up on these tracks. So this way I'm basically able to record  my end of the live performance, anyway, within Ableton directly as audio,  which I think is pretty cool. That's basically the live setup  or a general overview of it, anyway. I think in

another video I'm going to  go into this in-depth and I'm going to show you how to basically set this up yourself,  um cuz I understand it probably looks like a little bit crazy when it's uh in this  sort of mad Excel spreadsheet, as it were. It is obviously time-consuming to set  this up, but I find that once it's done, it's done, and it just makes the job of gigging  and rehearsing like so fast right, because it's pretty much like I don't really have to spend  ages [ __ ] about setting up loa

ds of equipment, it's all ready to go and when I'm playing as  well, I don't have to worry about like "oh I've got to remember to turn this effects pedal  off" and then I don't have to remember like "I've got to turn my guitar back up at this point,  I've been playing keys and then I go to guitar and I've [ __ ] forgotten to turn my guitar  up and it's not making any sound and I look like a [ __ ]". Yeah there's none of that with  this, it's all just like perfectly orchestrated. And once it's do

ne, it's  done - and it becomes a joy. In future videos I'll be going a little bit more  into detail about all of this stuff I'll be using my FF interpretation tracks to cover topics  like making midi instruments sound not crap, I'll be going into the Proteus 2000 and  specifically some of the cool authentic Final Fantasy sounds that I managed to get off  of it without sampling from the original games, I'm also going to do a more in-depth breakdown  about my mixing method and kind of how to make

stuff sound a little bit better for Spotify  and Bandcamp and digital releasing and all the rest of it, and then yeah I will get to  a video about my entire life setup and kind of a detailed step-by-step breakdown of how  you can make something like that yourself. If you can't wait for more, then you can hear  my full Final Fantasy 7 covers album right now, 'Cactuar Collections - Disc One (FFVII)' Thank you very much for watching, I hope  some of this has been either insightful, interesting or

just fun to look at. If there's anything that you'd like me  to answer that I've not quite covered, do feel free to give me a shout in  the comments or whatnot, and uh yeah, don't forget to just you know, keep  being yourself and just smashing it at life, you don't need to do anything else, you  are absolutely killing it. safe, take it easy.