I didn’t want to leave the internet all alone this weekend, but I’ve been busy with some behind the scenes work. In addition to the behind the scenes work, I have also been busy fighting off yesterday’s disagreeable seafood lunch.
But, what the heck; I might as well take the chance to talk a little about the new tricks I’m learning. This whole blog is supposed to be about my sabbatical (or whatever you want to call it), not just the books I finish.
Some people have asked me how I put together my Pop Studies album that I posted earlier. Basically all the sample-based work I do on my computer happens in Ableton Live. Live was originally designed to be a tool for electronic music producers who needed a coherent way to synthesize and arrange all their tunes. So, if you wanted, you could take a prerecorded drum loop, load it up in Live, visually “warp” it to mark where the beats are, and then play it back in sync with the rest of your composition.
Instead of loading just short instrumental samples, you can also load entire songs into Live, using the warping feature to line up their beats, and use Live to DJ. What’s great about this is that you can combine things like professionally released songs with your own drum beat or live guitar playing or anything else you can think of and run various effects throughout the whole thing.
For my Pop Studies, I loaded the sampled songs into Live, and used its various features to chop them up and rearrange the pieces. Once the pieces were set up, I could use a MIDI controller to improvise the compositions on the fly, recording the results and touching them up after the fact.
The warping feature in Live makes it great for DJing, but many people who perform digital music use Max/MSP instead. Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead runs his guitar through custom made patches in Max, Autechre and Aphex Twin use it for more electronic music, and Girl Talk actually uses it to make his mashups.
As you can see, it’s a bit more complicated to use and set up than Live, but it gives a lot of flexibility and should let me set up more customized interfaces to use for future sound projects. I’m still in the midst of the early tutorials (apparently you can also use the program to do basic arithmetic, if you want), but if something worth talking about happens, I’ll post it up here.
