Ableton Live – lesson 5

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 do create a palette of musical ideas. This was the first 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, such as creating our sounds using the rack.

I developed the idea from previous assignment of using the drum intro by Deep Purple’s Ian Paice. This time I converted the wav to Midi and used it for playback on several electronic drumkits. So the main musical idea was to transfer the feel of a human drummer to electronic kits. I also reduced the tempo from the original 93 bpm to 88. I also set up the sound card of my computer so that I could capture streams from Spotify directly in clips in Live. I could then apply the recored segment directly in Simpler. I sampled the intro to Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet in G-minor. Warped that in a clip to suit the tempo. Then I made an instrument rack featurning a high and a low analogue monophonic synth for monumental melodies. And I added to the rack a looped segment from the Grieg recording. This rack was played through midi keyboard and recorded as an unison melody to go together wiht the warped Grieg intro. That’s the first part of my upload. Then I sampled and transposed 4 segments from Grieg’s choir music and assigned to 4 separate pads in a drum rack. These are one shot samples, gated, that I can play live for improvisations. Then I added my own voice through a vocoder setup. I use a brass sound for carrier. This is tested over a musical loop featuring Paices groove on electronic kits and me playing a 6-2-5-1 chord section. I may have made too much of arrangements this time, rather than playing with sounds on their own. I still learnt some ideas and techniques that I can apply later and further develop.