Ableton Session View and instrument design

We usually think of “recorded” and “live” as two distinct and opposed forms of music. But technology has been steadily eroding the distinction between the two. Controllerism is a performance method using specialized control surfaces to trigger sample playback and manipulate effects parameters with the full fluidity and expressiveness of a conventional instrument. Such performance can take place on stage or in the studio.

Controllerism is attractive to me because I came to music through improvisation: blues, jazz, jam bands. I spent years improvising electronic music with Babsy Singer, though she did the beats and loops, not me. My life as a producer, meanwhile, has involved very little improvisation. Making music with the computer has been more like carefully writing scores. Improvisation and composition are really the same thing, but the timescales are different. Improvisation has an immediacy that composing on paper doesn’t. The computer shortens the loop from thought to music, but there’s still a lot of obligatory clicking around.

It’s certainly possible to improvise on the computer with MIDI controllers, either the usual keyboard variety or the wackier and more exotic ones. Improvising with MIDI and then cleaning up the results more meticulously is pretty satisfying, though my lack of piano skills make it almost as slow and tedious an input system as the mouse. Jamming on iPhone and iPad apps like Animoog or GarageBand is better. What they lack in screen real estate, they make up for with form factor. Making music on the computer comes to feel like office work after a while. But you can use the phone or the tablet while lying in bed or on the ground, or while pacing around, or basically anywhere. Multitouch also restores some of the immediacy of playing instruments.

There’s also the option of recording a lot of vocal or instrumental improvisation, and then sorting out all the audio afterwards. This is the most satisfying strategy for infusing electronic music with improvisation that I’ve found so far. You get all the free-flowing body-centered immediacy of live jamming, with no pressure whatsoever to be flawless. However, then you have to do the editing. It’s easier now than it was five or ten years ago, but it’s still labor-intensive. It can take an hour of work to shape a few minutes of improv into musical shape.

All of this time, I’ve had severe DJ envy, since their gear is designed for immediacy and improvisation. It’s a lame DJ indeed who meticulously stitches together a set ahead-of-time in an audio editor. However, DJ tools operate at the level of entire songs. It’s not easy to use Serato to write a new track. I’ve been wanting a tool that gives me the same sense of play, but at the scale of individual samples rather than entire songs.

Enter the APC40. The form factor resembles an MPC, and you can use it that way, to trigger one-shot samples like drum hits or chord stabs. But the intended use case is for Ableton session view, starting and stopping the playback of loops. By default, loop playback is quantized to the bar, so whenever you hit a pad, the loop begins playing cleanly on the next downbeat. (You can set the quantization interval to be as wide or narrow as you want, or disable it completely.) Playing your loops live makes happy accidents more likely. Of course, unhappy accidents are more likely too. But those are easy to fix in Arrange view. When I discovered that NYU has a little-used APC, I signed it out and started teaching myself controllerism. Here’s a picture of it.

http://instagram.com/p/uYUTwqBdwE/

It seems complex, and it is. The Starship Enterprise quality appeals to my tech nerd side. Creating an Ableton session for APC playing is like inventing a new musical instrument, every time. After you design your instrument, then you have to learn how to play it. On the other hand, if you design your instrument right, the actual playing of it can be fun and easy. When I set up the APC with some Michael Jackson samples and let Milo try it, he figured out the concept immediately.

http://instagram.com/p/ubq-xYhd96/

The heart of the APC is its grid of touch pads. Each one controls a cell in Ableton Live‘s  spreadsheet-like Session view. Each cell in the spreadsheet can hold an audio or MIDI loop. Touching a pad starts the corresponding loop playing. The APC has forty pads in eight columns of five. Only one loop per column can play at a time. Special pads along the edge of the grid can trigger an entire row at once. The idea is that you can organize your loops into “scenes” (intro, verse, chorus, breakdown etc) and then enter and exit scenes as you see fit. The various knobs can be used to manipulate effects parameters.

So how is the APC as a music-making tool? For me, it’s been tough. I’ve been making loop-based music for quite a few years now, but playing the loops like notes on an instrument is another conceptual level entirely. Managing eight sets of loops at once is a plate-spinning exercise. You need to be closely familiar with all of the loops and have some idea of how they’ll all sound in combination. You also need to have them laid out on the grid in a logical way, because the pads all look the same and it’s hard to remember which loop is assigned to which pad.

Before any kind of jamming can happen, you first need to assemble a set of loops. For maximum improvisational freedom, the pitched content of the loops should all fall into the same scale, or at least not clash too horribly. I figured that the best approach would be to pull a set of samples from a single song. I went into my collection of Beatles stems and set to work on the components of “Dear Prudence.” I thought it would be easy, since harmonically it’s pretty static. I was wrong. It took me many tries to get a satisfying improvisation, and even then I had to edit it quite a bit afterwards.

Most of my mistakes were a simple matter of not being able to find the right loop when I wanted it, or missing an entrance or exit. I also made several “off-by-one errors,” where I started a two-bar loop one bar too late or early. Those kinds of mistakes could be prevented by more careful adjustment of the quantization settings, but sometimes flipping the phase of a phrase ended up sounding great. Loops that have an eccentric length, like two and a half bars, cycled in and out of phase in unpredictable ways that sounded cool or awkward depending on the circumstances.

Next, I tried an even more masochistic challenge, “A Day In The Life.” There are a lot of truly amazing samples in this song, but the potential for chord clash is strong, and it took me a good while to navigate through the possibilities in a musical-sounding way. I had quite a few more samples than forty, and scrolling around the grid made a difficult task even harder.

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/a-day-in-the-lifetron

I’m sure that if I did some dedicated practicing, I could probably get proficient at improvising on the Beatles songs. But they are definitely not ideal beginner material. I needed something more dance-oriented and Afrocentric. My thoughts immediately turned to Michael Jackson. The only high-quality set of his stems I could find at first were from “PYT.” I don’t love the tune as much as other MJ classics, but that turned out to be a positive. It’s easier to radically remake a song if you aren’t too attached to its original form.

Rather than just strewing loops across the grid, I committed myself to using exactly forty loops divided neatly into eight categories: drums, bass, rhodes, guitar, synth, synth vocals, regular vocals, and more regular vocals. Here are the “PYT” stems cut up into sections:

And here’s the set of loops I boiled all of that down to:

This is the set of loops I had Milo play with, and they were quite a bit more approachable, since all of them are mutually musically compatible. Here’s my edited improvisation, the first of these that flowed relatively easily:

After more diligent Googling, I located stems for “Rock With You” and did the same procedure. This worked even better; even though there was more opportunity for chord clash.

All of my APC performances so far tend to take a similar shape: I build up the rhythm section and then once I arrive at a groove, I let it run indefinitely while I devote all of my attention to top-line elements. It’s very different from the way I structure tracks by asynchronously arranging elements on the DAW grid, where I try to keep the groove varying.

All this time, I’ve been referring to the APC as an instrument. Not everyone would agree with that characterization. My classically trained students mostly don’t. They hold a clear separation in their heads between playing “your own” sounds on an instrument versus playing back “someone else’s” sounds with the computer. My experience teaches me that the distinction is completely meaningless. I have to work harder to fit a diverse set of loops together than I do to reel off stock riffs and chord progressions on the guitar. Whatever hand-holding that Ableton does for me is more than offset by the staggering cognitive complexity of the task. Playing loops is easy, but playing the right loops in the right sequence is hard. With eight loops going at a time, it is awfully difficult to pay attention to all of them.

Still, I can’t deny the basic DJ-ness of the APC experience. My students and friends alike react to the APC immediately as if it’s a piece of DJ gear. After demonstrating the APC in class, a student half-jokingly asked my what my DJ name is. I told her that after age 35, it’s a little late for DJ names. But it reminded me of a crucial idea: teachers are DJs of knowledge.

I love playing acoustic instruments, but I find it hard to create genuinely new music with them. The guitar is just not the right tool for expressing the emotional reality of America in 2014. It works better for interpreting the music of the past. Even though I’ve been playing the APC only using samples of pop songs of previous decades, I feel like I’m speaking more to the present moment than I can with instruments. I can’t think of a better way to access my own musical truths than by resequencing the DNA of a familiar pop song via improvisation.

I have yet to try playing loops from multiple sources at the same time. I tried throwing some jazz samples together, but the blend of timbres and harmonies was a total mess. Using multitracks of a single song guarantees a good sonic fit; chances are, any part of the bassline of a Michael Jackson song will sound okay under any part of the keyboard part or vocal melody. An entire segment of a Duke Ellington song won’t necessarily fit a segment of a Miles Davis song. It’s going to be a challenge to find musically coherent sets of loops from a wider range of sources.

The other major piece of unexplored territory is Ableton’s own Push controller. It’s a newer and more sophisticated tool than the APC. I’ve fiddled with it a bit in the store, but it’s much too complex to get a handle on in that setting. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one for an extended period of time and exploring its possibilities.