I make better music when I've just woken up, my ears are more fresh first thing in the morning, and I just seem to feel happier when I wake up with the sunrise. If I have a great idea late at night I might sketch something out, but a 5 hour session starting at 9 PM is drastically different from one starting at 9 AM (and the latter I'd argue is more productive). Plus I'm taking two 8:30 AM classes this semester, so it's easier to just accept my position and find a way to work around it than it is to hinder my education.

Logic Pro training books are only useful if you plan on taking the certification exam; they get outdated really quickly. You can get as much from just going through the instruction manual start to finish and clicking on everything in the DAW at least once.

Whatever introduces a radically new sound to an emerging audience. That's how it's always been, so just keep an eye on whatever music the outcasts currently working their way through middle school and into high school are either discovering or inventing.

I'm with you, though we do have laptops and external hard drives we can use to carry that content and we can transfer stuff onto and off of those flash drives. I could see myself bringing maybe 100, 200 tracks TOTAL to any one show, then just replacing all the non-"staple" songs I've used when I get back to my computer.

I mean, ideally I can bring my laptop with me and just play off Traktor to avoid the problem altogether, but unless you're playing something like a 4 hour Drum and Bass set you'll probably be good with a few hundred tracks. That being said, I still would want as large a flash drive as possible because I need those delicious, uncompressed .WAV files for my sets.

Probably because they want to. 

That's gonna be up to personal preference; in my opinion most printed audio should be completely mono so I can have as much control over my stereo imaging as possible. The only audio files that I would really want to be stereo are things specifically recorded in stereo for their panoramic effect - like ambiances & atmospheres or a recording that is meant to pick up the doppler effect (though again, I can do that physically with transposition/pitch bending and pan pot automation).

So I'd personally process and mix the sounds to fit together directly on top of one another (I use fades on the non-transient sounds to preserve the attack that i want, level balance to peak somewhere around -0.5 or -1 dB, and EQ/compress only as needed to save some work later on down the road), then just mix it into the track like I normally would any other snare. I always bounce out the hit to a new sample right away whenever I'm making layered hits; it's just easier to work with than a big 3 or 4 layer stack of one shots (thanks to Mr. Bill for that idea).

Really digging that live setup, Ninth! Is the launchpad just for clips, or do you play in any of your beats live?

If it was made in sylenth, you can probably make it in almost any other synth out there. Start messing around with saw and squares in various states of unison and detune put under a low pass filter with an LFO swinging the cutoff down at a 16th note rate (though it's not exactly the same rate; maybe a Hz value?), and i'm fairly certain that's the Ableton Redux bitcrusher on top put through a send?

Decimate distortion played a large part in making the sound sound the way it does - so be careful about what kind of bitcrush/distortion you use. I used Sylenth's built in decimate distortion.

NEVERMIND IM DUMB

Spoke with one of my professors about this, and he pointed me to this PDF that might help some people out!