Ableton Forum

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/0 ... _clar.html

you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll laugh again.
you'll feel like you just injected raw gearlust into your eyeball and instantly obtained grade9 G.A.S from watching this video.

you have been warned.

Drool. That's an analog museum!

Thanks for sharing that!

Thanks for posting. I did fap.

he's a very intelligent bloke is Vince Clarke, however, with a few exceptions, Erasure made some pretty awful music, at least to my ears.

Much of Vince Clarke's music is very simple, melody wise. Depeche Mode certainly evolved plenty after he left, whereas Yazoo/Yaz and Erasure still sound somewhat like Depeche Mode circa Speak And Spell IMO (music wise, if not vocally). In Erasure he cracked out the acoustic guitar a bit more while still retaining those dinky little synth melodies.

He plays to his strengths - he doesn't try to be Hans Zimmer. That works for some more than others, but he has always loved his analogue synths and been a music tech advocate - I remember seeing him on telly circa 1985 with his BBC Model B controlled MIDI sequencer. He also never followed the crowd, while people were grabbing Roland D50s and Korg M1s he was happy with his old analogue synths and stuff like the Casio CZ-1 and CZ-1000.

He also did a cool remix of the Happy Monday's 'Wrote For Luck' ...

Awesome!!!!

Thanks for the link..

Just what I needed...

As cool as that is I don't think I'd want to write music in that environment. He said he starts with guitar because messing with synths would be too much of a distraction and I can see why. A lot of us love messing with synths, even if it's just softsynths, and I think as a result the music comes out a little colder and less inspiring...doesn't really strike an emotional chord. I imagine it would be even worse running around in a room full of hardware.

beats me wrote: He said he starts with guitar because messing with synths would be too much of a distraction and I can see why. ...

I think thre is an important lesson in that fro everyone....

alex.the.forge wrote:

beats me wrote: He said he starts with guitar because messing with synths would be too much of a distraction and I can see why. ...

I think thre is an important lesson in that fro everyone....

I'd love to hear the acoustic version of today's Electro House hits.

I'm a little bit dubious about his preference for writing on an acoustic.

As was pointed out by leedsquietman his tunes are hardly complex sequences of highly intricate keychanges!
For example - I just checked the chords for "a little respect" and they are Cmaj, Gmaj, Emin, Fmaj. Now, erm - That's possibly the easiest set of chords to play on keys! link

I play guitar and keyboards both intolerably badly, but I find it much simpler to write on a keyboard because it's easy to see the related keys (what related chords are in the mode, etc) and where a keychange could be disguised or led to, simply by looking at the notes. On a keyboard you can see chord inversions as plain as day, and see how they can be modulated: such as an inverted Cmaj played G,C,E can be modulated to Emin G,F,E by simply moving one finger.

I have to wonder : is he really preferring writing on the guitar for musical reasons, or is he actually just happy chugging out simple barre chords before entering them into the ARP sequencer?
Barre Emaj shape, barre Amaj shape, up and down the fretboard ... that can get a guy pretty far.

Angstrom wrote:I'm a little bit dubious about his preference for writing on an acoustic.

As was pointed out by leedsquietman his tunes are hardly complex sequences of highly intricate keychanges!
For example - I just checked the chords for "a little respect" and they are Cmaj, Gmaj, Emin, Fmaj. Now, erm - That's possibly the easiest set of chords to play on keys! link

I play guitar and keyboards both intolerably badly, but I find it much simpler to write on a keyboard because it's easy to see the related keys (what related chords are in the mode, etc) and where a keychange could be disguised or led to, simply by looking at the notes. On a keyboard you can see chord inversions as plain as day, and see how they can be modulated: such as an inverted Cmaj played G,C,E can be modulated to Emin G,F,E by simply moving one finger.

I have to wonder : is he really preferring writing on the guitar for musical reasons, or is he actually just happy chugging out simple barre chords before entering them into the ARP sequencer?
Barre Emaj shape, barre Amaj shape, up and down the fretboard ... that can get a guy pretty far.

I don't think we're talking about compositional complexity in a song. I think it's more about coming up with songs that go somewhere other than computer loops and slight variations, especially if you're working with other musicians or a vocalist. It's just easier with that live jam factor to come up with different ideas. A computer isn't capable of guessing where the other band mates might go and instantly come up with variations on the fly based on that.

Yeah, but why not jam on a keyboard?

Perhaps it's not about Jamming chords and melodies, but rather because inflections and intonations are easier to access on a guitar. Moving from a damped "chucka-chucka" to on open "skrang" is easy on guitar. No need to open the chucka-skrang menu option, assign to midi cc, troubleshoot controller latency, etc. Just move the fingers.
Synths still have a long way to go before they can match the immediate expressiveness of guitar, but if its down to writing melody and chords I choose keys every time.