See previous posts about the lockdown that occurred in spring 2020 and how I used the time spent at home to study Ableton Live 10 at a well known music education institution. Below are my comments on assignment 5, which asked us to develop the ideas from lesson 5 into a composition. This was the second assignment of 3, which eventually lead to a complete composition which was worked on in terms of mixing and the use of spesific functions of Ableton.
Assignment 7 – the completion of a new original piece of music
In this project I have used 5 different return channels. I was not sure what kind of reverb works for rhythmical music of a mid tempo. A hall reverb with a long reverb tail would probably mess things a little, so I selected a room type preset called Garage. This receives a small portion of vocals, piano, and snare drum. After some reading on the net, I found a way to add return chains in a drum rack to individually process the snare drum. A separate return channel for the lead vocals has a delay inserted with a 50 ms delay on the left channel and a 170 ms delay on the right. I saw an article on the net about this technique for creating a sense of space for the vocals. I use a chain of inserts for the rhythm guitar that I recorded. I play barre chords quite badly and had to masque the guitar in chain consisting of compressor, amp, saturator, flanger, delay and finally an auto filter with a bell curve attenuating higs and lows. For automation, I had to draw in quite some in the busy section towards the end. In general, I found it useful to listen to most tracks in context in order to position the sounds in an appropriate space taking into consideration the dimensions.
