Remixing Verdi with Ableton Live

Later this week I’m doing a teaching demo for a music technology professor job. The students are classical music types who don’t have a lot of music tech background, and the task is to blow their minds. I’m told that a lot of them are singers working on Verdi’s Requiem. My plan, then, is to walk the class through the process of remixing a section of the Requiem with Ableton Live. This post is basically the script for my lecture.

Going in, I’m not much an expert on Verdi (though I do admire how sharp he looked in a top hat.) My dad was an opera buff, and I probably heard the Requiem passively when I was growing up, but I can’t recall any of it from memory. For expediency, I decide to just look on iTunes for the shortest and most popular movement, which turns out to be “Messa da Requiem: II, Dies Irae: 1, Dies Irae.” Dies Irae means “day of wrath” in Latin, and the music is certainly plenty wrathful.

The first task is to drop the piece into a track in Arrange view. Next, I warp it out, which is Ableton-speak for finding the bars and beats in the music and making sure they line up with the software’s time grid. Warping is easy with metronomic pop music; you just identify the first downbeat, and Live usually handles the rest automatically. Things get more difficult with classical music, which tends to take a looser approach to time than the dance music that Live was designed for. But it turns out that Verdi’s “Dies Irae” doesn’t vary too much from metronomic time, so warping it requires minimal effort. The yellow markers in the image below are “handles” you can use to drag parts of the audio to and fro.

Usually the visual grid is enough of a guideline to warp to, but sometimes you need a beat playing to help you. I prefer to use a drum loop rather than Live’s metronome. I try a few different samples from my breakbeats folder, and settle on the old reliable “Impeach The President” beat. I extract the groove so I can quantize other stuff to it later — in other words, I find the grid implied by the “Impeach” break’s slight idiosyncrasies, so I can line other rhythmic events up with it.

The next step is to go through the piece hunting for loops. This also turns out to be easy, since Verdi uses a lot of hooky little self-contained phrases that are one, two or four bars long. In the image below, I’ve duplicated the track; the original is on top, and the version cut into loops is underneath.

Next, I copy and paste the loops into Live’s Session view. This is the part of the software that is both the most futuristic and the least understood. Session view gives you a palette of musical materials that you can deploy improvisationally. It’s like a spreadsheet, where each cell contains a different hunk of audio or MIDI. Each cell has a little button that triggers playback of its contents. You can do your triggering with the mouse and keyboard, or you can use a specialized controller where each cell is assigned a physical button. The beautiful thing is that it’s not necessary to hit the buttons in perfect time; if you trigger a loop, it starts the next time the beat comes around.

Before I perform with the Verdi loops, I do some additional setup. The third track has two different versions of the breakbeat: the regular one, and an alternative version I made with the snares removed. The fourth track has a synth droning the note G2 on mute. It’s there to act as a carrier for the vocoder plugin I’ll be applying to the drums later. Finally, there’s another synth for the bassline, for which I programmed a few MIDI clips playing simple funk riffs.

Now I’m ready to improvise. First I do a simple pass, just triggering loops as I feel them. Here’s the result.

Next, I improvise on top of this with effects. That opening loop is too repetitive, so I lay down some dramatic low-pass filtering on top of it. The filter creates a whooshing sound, as if the Verdi is moving closer and further, submerging underwater and surfacing. This kind of filtering is a dance music cliche, but for good reason, it’s sonically arresting.

I add two more items from my catalog of preferred audio effects. First, I use a simple delay, which just plays copies of the audio after a specified time interval. I set the delay time to a dotted eighth note, which creates a satisfying automatic hemiola. Second, I add beat repeat, which semi-randomly takes slices of the audio and stutters them. I automate these effects’ entrance and exit as I see fit. Also, as I’m going through and tidying up, I realize that it would be cool to do a breakdown section in the drums that’s the backbeat snare only.

For further timbral variety, I selectively apply the vocoder plugin on the drums. I need to change the carrier pitch in one spot to match the key center of a sample. Similarly, I need to adjust the bassline here and there. Here’s the final arrangement:

Take a listen to the finished product:

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/verdis-requiem-remix

I mentioned above that Ableton Live’s Session view is both its most futuristic and least understood feature. Arrange view is more familiar and intuitive to the vast majority of users, since it resembles other Digital Audio Workstations more closely. A guy who works for Ableton told me that a substantial percentage of Live users never touch Session view at all. Nevertheless, Ableton is committed to it; the software defaults to Session view, and specialty controllers are geared toward its grid layout, including Ableton’s own Push controller.

The challenge for people wanting to use Session view isn’t in learning the software. The interface makes sense and is superbly well designed. The challenge is more in the assumptions that underlie Session view about the nature of electronic music production. Session view treats production as a performance, a spontaneous set of actions you carry out in the moment. Most production tools are predicated more on the metaphors of tape recording and pen-and-paper composition. The whole idea of performing music on a computer is a new one, and it’s going to take the world some time to catch up to Ableton’s conception. For me, most of the work (and the creativity) comes in extracting and prepping my loops, and for that I prefer Arrange view. But it’s also true that I learned the tape-recorder and pen-and-paper paradigms thoroughly long before I touched Live. I’m a fervent believer in the power of improvisation as a means of accessing musical truth; maybe I should push myself harder to adapt my workflow to the Session paradigm.

Update: I got the job! I’m teaching Introduction to Music Technology at Montclair State University starting this fall.