Ableton Forum

Heart in mouth I post these =)

Since buying Ableton and Reason I have been getting into the swing of recording the slightly odd songs I come up with. Inspiration comes from buying new toys mostly =)

My stuff is not electronica so I reckon some people might find it odd that I chose Ableton but I find Live to be a superb tool for creating and building up stuff. It just fits the way my mind works so much better than traditional DAW stuff. That and the fact that it was designed to be so easy to use that even eejits like me can cope. I've tried most of the big ones but Ableton is the first one where I actually 'got shit done'.

I thought I would post here as I have found these forums very useful. The tips especially, OMG stop buttons, removing them is awesome. Never twigged till I read that tip and now it's a major part of dealing with Live.

So having rambled on (not sure if thats what folks do on this forum but I reckon it's polite to introduce yourself) here are the first 3 opuses... opi?

1) Ukulele Ain't Noise Pollution (2.9Mb)
Need I say more. I bought a $40 uke and it's the most fun you can have with a toy guitar... I mean small guitar. Superb fun. So inevitably I recorded something. This was the first attempt at using Ableton/Reason combo

2) Sorry (2.9Mb)
I finally decided to buy a bass guitar, synth bases just don't cut it for me. So I picked up a re-issue Fender Jazz '62 (Jap model) from TradeMe (Kiwi's will know what I mean) and God I love it. Fender Jazzes are amazingly versatile basses, from the richest rolling deep reggae tones, through the punchy bup-bup-bup of Jaco Pastorius to the ultra-slick slap tones of Marcus Miller. All Fender Jazzes. Oops, I ranted! Anyway I bought one and was inspired for this track. The track is called Sorry because it reminded me of the kind of feeling when you have hurt someone you loved and want to make them feel better, so it's a mournful feeling with a kind of attempt at pick me up. Not sure that came through =)

3) Blue Siesta (9.49Mb)
My poor old guitar was feeling left out, so I decided a guitar centric track was needed. This guitar has been my only 6 string electric guitar for... er.. 30? years. Dunno if I could play anything else now. It's a custom made jobbie with mostly ESP parts and some EMG pickups which I kinda like. Anyway, this track was inspired by the 12th fret. I love the kind of hollow bell like tones if you play around that region and take care to pick in the right place to get the roundest harmonics. I think the feel of the song suited the title, it took a while to get it working, it wasn't until I realised 'OMG it's a Bossa Nova' that it started to gel. Apologies for some dodgy tuning, but it sounded good enough after a few whiskies.

So can I keep comin up with new stuff? That is the question...

Any comments gratefully received, this is my first trip into recording since way back in my youth when I did a few songs with a buddy on my state of the art Tascam 244! The whole production thing is a massive subject, I have a long way to go.

EDIT: Christmas Day
New toon.
4) Koola Hula (7.6mb)

EDIT: 17/01/2009
5) Dolce et Dolor

LATEST! EDIT: 15/12/2009
6) Seventh C (9.8MB)

Cheers

Simon

I like your style! Tearing up the uke, that was great!

Sorry has great potential, I personally love that sombre feel but thought the track was a wee bit static as is, mainly the drums, I s'pose.

Blue Siesta's just lovely. Nicely restrained, pretty melody and some very tasty playing.

Keep going!

Great tunes! Were you doing some tapping on the banjo? Particularly enjoyed 'sorry'.

Were you recording your bass straight in to your sound card/computer? Or recording from an amp? I have a fender bass and it doesn't sound half as warm as that!

Cool guys, thanks so much for the kind comments.

You spotted the Uke drums too eh? =) Yeah I found a few nice noises from basically smacking it over the sound hole (ooerrrr!) and scratching the side with me nails. EDIT: Re-reading you didnt mean that kinda tapping i think, but yeah I did that too! Eddie Van Halen move over, Uke shredding is the new kid on the block haha.

The bass is just going straight into the M-Audio and then using the Crystal Bass preset rack in Ableton. I did double-track the bass in the Blue Siesta thing, nothing techy, just played it twice =) Really just experimenting with layering to see what extra warmth you could get.

Thanks again guys, glad it wasn't a total train wreck and yeah there will be more I hope =)

Cheers much

S

Excellent stuff neighbour!! A real pleasure to listen to. Look forward to more.

Blue Siesta sounds just as good if not better than a lot of music I own. You're off to a great start!

Finally got round to finishing the latest effort, bit of a struggle with this one =) But I have to say that I have finished several fine PC games in the interim so it wasn't ALL play... oh wait, yes it was.

Anyway, here's a slightly more ambitious one and to be honest it's a bit of a shock how it turned out. Funny how the stuff you come up with can be totally left field from what you *thought* you would do.

So without more ado, let me introduce:
4) Koola Hula (7.6mb)
Featuring the $40 Ukelele again (yay!) and... well.. I blew $300 bucks on a bottle of whisky for my Xmas pressy to myself and the outro got outrageous ... there's guitars ... and fuzzboxes and more echo than you can shake your hippy stick at. Somehow my inner rock dinosaur came out to play. But what the hell, a man's gotta be true to his inner rock dino right?

Happy Christmas all!

S

i like the opening melody to siesta, drags on a bit too long, you should do something with it to alter it as it progresses

Fair comment, I had an inkling that might be the case. Slowly getting into the swing of building up tracks with more variation, the last one was an attempt to move in that direction.

S

Checking this out on crappy laptop speakers and it sounds great! Love the concept of the uke song and it sounds great too! And Blue Siesta is just an all around great compostion and recording. Nice sense of space, full mix but not too crowded. Only thing I would have liked to hear is a little more ampy sound on the guitars, but again, I'm listening on crappy speakers so maybe I'm missing that..

Great music and great guitar playing! Thanks!

And another, totally new direction this time =) It just started with two chords and then the melody sounded all Godfather'ish and it basically took on an unexpected life of it's own.

One thing I like about this is there is ACCORDION!!!! There was a post somewhere about how useless Accordion was, so I had to address that =)

Anyway:

Off to Sicily we go. Take a seat, have a slice of pizza, sip on a vintage Chianti and rest your shotgun on your lap as a quaking boy grovels before you...

'So... you show disrespect to my daughter, you show disrespect to me, this I'm sure you understand! Such a terrible situation you put me in. How can we resolve this you think?'

Spreading your hands magnanimously a little Chianti spills and drips slowly, dark bloody red, from your little finger onto your sobbing daughter's virginal white dress.

Mama looks on, eyes like black stones.

Dolce et Dolor

Love'n'stuff

S

Been a long time, but I finally got my arse back into finishing something. Ableton tried to stop me honest! I had that out of memory error and I couldnt get back into the set, big sweat on! Thankfully the /3GB switch rescued it *phew*

Let me tell you a story...

It all started with the simple octave striding piano, one of the first sounds I ever played with in Ableton (Airport Piano) and it's been sitting there untouched, in a lonely project for like.. ever!

No matter what I tried, it always sounded better never ever changing key, it seemed determined that C was the place to umm.. B. Instead I ended up with some ideas in C7 and some in CMaj7... So, I thought... put the two ideas together in a concept piece. A song about sevenths of C.. Seventh C, about the mood of the seventh vs the mood of the Maj7. Don't ask about CMinor 7, he never turned up for auditions *shrug*

Anyway, here is the result, a mood piece that goes from the 'too school for school' jazzy trendy thang that is the 7th, to the pristine perfect beauty of the Maj 7th.

Personally, I think the that old Major Seventh is terribly overlooked in favour of DJ Jazzy Seventh, it has an ethereal uplifting and lyrical quality that gets me right there *points*

It's quite long (6 minutes), but the first cut was 10 mins so I have been as ruthless as I can. It is so happy to just trundle on and on, it's kinda cruel to bring it up short.

If it's of any interest the sax/trumpet are the Sample Modelling instruments played with Akai EWI USB, and the strings are the Garritan strings that came with the EWI, played again with the EWI.

Anyway, hope you like it

S

Seventh C (9.8MB)