My music-making life has revolved heavily around Ableton Live for the past few years, and now the same thing is happening to my music-teaching life. I’m teaching Live at NYU’s IMPACT program this summer, and am going to find ways to work it into my future classes as well. My larger ambition is to develop an all-around electronic music composition/improvisation/performance curriculum centered around Live.
While the people at Ableton have done a wonderful job documenting their software, they mostly presume that users know what they want to accomplish, they just don’t know how to get there. But my experience of beginner Ableton users (and newbie producers generally) is that they don’t even know what the possibilities are, what the workflow looks like, or how to get a foothold. My goal is to fill that vacuum, and I’ll be documenting the process extensively here on the blog.
I recently started teaching Ableton to Sarah Alden, an ace fiddle player and singer who straddles bluegrass, klezmer and other folk-oriented genres.
Sarah’s goals with Ableton:
- To develop solo fiddle repertoire where she is accompanied by loops of herself.
- To write new material that gets her beyond the cliches and limitations of her instrument.
- To explore new sounds and textures, like electronic beats and synths.
Sarah is an ideal test case, because while she’s an accomplished and experienced musician, she has very little knowledge of recording, production or synthesis. Any difficulties she has with Ableton won’t be due to lack of musical sophistication or ability. Sarah bought Live after hearing other musicians rave about it, including Todd Reynolds. However, she wasn’t able to make much progress with it on her own. While she’s somewhat familiar with the DAW paradigm, she found Session view to be completely impenetrable.
In our first session together, I walked Sarah through different features of the program, demonstrating the possibilities. She was familiar with the idea of capturing and deploying loops, but was not aware of how much it’s possible to manipulate and alter those loops. Like most Live newbies, she was totally unaware of the existence of warping, or rhythmic quantization generally. She was fairly dazzled by all of the effects, especially vocoder, grain delay and beat repeat.
Sarah is certainly hip to the idea of sampling, and open to widely eclectic source material. She didn’t raise an eyebrow when I looped some pieces of Bob Wills, the Yiddish Radio Project and De La Soul. She didn’t know that it was so easy to combine these kinds of sounds, but she was already intending to take a hip-hop producer approach to her own recorded playing. She observed immediately that the effortlessness of sampling in Live could keep you busy for a lifetime just trying out different combinations. This points to a bigger issue in learning how to produce electronic music: how do you keep from being paralyzed by the infinite possibilities?
It falls to the teacher to impose some useful constraints, to keep students from being overwhelmed. I provide my students with a breakbeat starter kit and encourage them to see how far they can get using nothing but the Funky Drummer break or what have you. At a more advanced level, the compositional challenges posed by Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto are extraordinarily effective at producing musically innovative results.
I see teaching music technology as a lot like teaching word processing or spreadsheets. There’s a certain amount of learning the tools themselves, all the menus and toolbars and terminology. But that’s the easy part. The hard part, the part you really need a teacher for, is producing the actual music, or prose, or charts. I could teach any reasonably well-educated adult Microsoft Word or Excel in an hour, but teaching someone how to put a sentence together or logically organize data takes years. So it is with programs like Live. Like I said, Ableton does a fantastic job of documenting and teaching the functionality of their software. What the world needs now is a curriculum for the artistic processes that all that functionality enables. We’ve got our work cut out for us.
Update: check out part two.