Ableton Loop 2018

I’m recently home from Ableton’s stupendous “summit for music makers,” and I’m still mentally unpacking it all.

Loop was quite a different experience from last year, when Ableton held it in their home city of Berlin. This year, they moved it to Los Angeles to make it easier for people in Latin America and the Pacific to get there. Rather than the dark and cold of November in Germany, we got to enjoy Southern California’s high seventies (and raging forest fires, so, a tradeoff.) In Berlin, the conference was all held in one big building, the Funkhaus recording studio complex. In LA, it was spread across several smaller venues, including the Ricardo Montalbán Theater with its beach-like roof deck, and the legendary EastWest Studios.

It was my first trip to LA as an adult. Every place name is familiar from movies, rap lyrics, or both. My Lyft from the airport passed by El Segundo, where Q-tip left his wallet, and the car was from West Covina Toyota, the home of Rachel, Paula, Josh, and White Josh. I was staying at a friend’s apartment on Spring Street in Downtown LA, and when I got there late at night, it was jumping off, with art vendors, street performers, taco trucks, and humanity in all its splendor. (I was later told that this was an Art Walk, and not normal for a Thursday night.) I hung out in front of a bodega listening to a DJ who looked like Danny Trejo spinning trance music that blended seamlessly with the street preacher ranting through a megaphone across the street. At one point Danny Trejo dropped the acapella to Björk’s “Crystalline” on top of some Qawwali. I was impressed. LA also has a lot of building-scale murals, adding to its general hip-hop vibe.

Loop itself took place in Hollywood. Will Kuhn and I spent the first morning walking around and gawking. Right when you step off the subway at Hollywood and Vine, for example, there’s the Capitol Records building.

I go to California often to see my in-laws, and I am still not used to billboards for weed delivery services.

After the opening remarks by Dennis DeSantis, I milled around the Montalbán Theater putting faces to Twitter handles. (It’s flattering how many of you people read this blog!) It was also a low-key Disquiet Junto meetup–for example, I got to meet Vonna Wolf.

The first session I attended was over at EastWest Studios. The list of classic albums recorded there place is staggering. Pet Sounds! Thriller! Rattle and Hum! 9 to 5! The place has a distinctive decor, too, at times evoking David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and, in this hallway, Tim Burton:

The Kubrick vibe is strongest in the men’s room:

The session was a small, intimate talk by TecBeatz, where I learned that the secret to being a successful trap producer is… file management.

I’m not joking. So much electronic music production comes down to fighting option paralysis. Tec’s strategy is one of the smarter ones I’ve heard: scheduling distinct “sample library organizing” sessions and “creating actual music” sessions. During his organization sessions, Tec creates 64-pad drum racks for himself that he meticulously organizes into quadrants and color codes. He does this so that when he goes into “producer mode,” he can flow effortlessly. He lays his kits out on the Push like so: The bottom left quadrant is a row of kicks, a row of snares, another row of kicks, and another row of snares. The top left quadrant is full percussion loops without much low end. The top right is hi-hat loops (full patterns, not single hits.) The bottom right is melody loops.

The beauty of organizing drum racks this way is that once Tec has a beat programmed, he can just select all the MIDI and transpose it up a semitone or two, and there’s a whole new beat. He transposed his pattern enough steps that suddenly the snare pattern was playing on the kick and the kick pattern was playing nothing, and that sounded amazing.

A whole segment of the session was devoted to the problem of figuring out the key of melodic samples. Tec uses Serato Sample, the top half of Serato as a VST. He also tests out key centers with tuned 808 kicks running through the tuner plugin, I guess because just using the piano is not very hip-hop. Other people in the session share their keyfinding strategies: using Mixed In Key, looking at the pitch of the fundamental in the EQ visualizer, using audio-to-MIDI, using Auto-Tune’s key finder function, using a specialized a Max For Live device, and so on. No one says “Go to school and learn music theory.” Music educators: this is the world you live in. It’s easy to sneer at these people, but they know how to use all that software; do you?

Later I went to hear Meara O’Reilly present on auditory illusions like hocket and multistable perception. This is a subject that interests me, because I like musical Necker cubes. Meara’s examples include Machaut’s Hoquetus David; a gamelan duet; Inuit partner games where they sing on both the inhale and exhale, which will familiar to Björk fans from Tagaq’s vocals on Medúlla; Kursk women simultaneously singing and blowing on panpipes; and an Akazahe duet from Burundi. From closer to home, Meara cites “Braggin’ In Brass” by Duke Ellington, one of many creative uses of hocket from his vast body of work:

You also hear hocket in Dirty Projectors, Meredith Monk, Tune-Yards, and Skrillex.

The last event I went to on day one was a panel on music technology and education with Lawrence Grey of Young Producers Group, Tiffany Miranda of Girls Make Beats, and DJ/marching band director Esteban Adame, all of whom are doing the work of the angels. The main theme was how music ed, done well, can be a powerful  emotional support system for kids who urgently need one. Esteban asked his students, “How has band changed your life?” One of the kids answered, “It helped me to be more social.” Tiffany describes beatmaking for girls as literal suicide prevention. This reminds me of Steve Dillon’s concept of music education as a public health measure, much safer and more effective than drugging up teenagers. Lawrence points out that if you validate kids emotionally in music class, the effects ripple outward to the rest of school, their homes, and their communities. That’s a lot of responsibility for us.

Lawrence said that “The mind grows as big as the box it thinks it’s in.” Socioeconomic factors can constrain the size of the box, but so can cultural factors, and regular old anxiety. Tiffany described 808s as a musical Trojan horse, both as a way to draw the kids into a larger musical world, and as a force unto themselves–it’s empowering for a kid to be in control of such a physically intense sound. It’s easy to draw kids in, but they don’t realize how hard and technical rap and EDM production actually are. (Most traditional musicians don’t realize it either.) There’s some heavy intellectual lifting happens behind all those four bar loops. We need to be smart about scaffolding the kids’ experience so they don’t get discouraged. Tiffany argues that the Push is not a luxury. A kid whose eyes glaze over from mouse clicking will probably be more enthusiastic about drumming on 64 backlit multicolored pads.

The panel was asked how they understand the nature of the resistance to doing music tech programs in public schools. Lawrence summed it up concisely: school systems’ first priority is to not get sued, which makes them resistant to innovation. However, there are plenty of opportunities, too. At those point, even the most financially challenged schools have at least one computer lab, which is enough to get started with. Sadly, those computer labs are being installed because of standardized testing, but the machines can run DAWs just as well as they can run testing software.

The panel spoke about the challenges within music education culture as well. Esteban described music tech as the “red-headed stepchild” of music education, which, as a literal red-headed stepchild myself, feels like a pretty apt metaphor. We have all heard someone say, “Oh, you guys don’t play instruments, that’s cute.” But music tech people have big advantages as educators. The bedroom producer ethos keeps our creative lives going even when we’re working full time. It’s depressingly rare for a music teacher to have an active musical life outside their job. I’d find it hard to play in ensembles amid work and kids and so on, but I can make music on my commute or wherever I happen to be. When students see their teacher busting out tracks on a regular basis, the energy is contagious.

Not that preprofessional arguments are the best music education advocacy tools, but if that is the approach you want to take, music tech has major advantages. Tiffany pointed out that the professional opportunities for music tech people are broad and growing–as an example, she shouted out the sound tech in the room. There are so many movies and TV shows and games, and so much other audio production happening in the world. Every appliance, gadget and app gives auditory feedback. Even the ATM plays you a little song. Someone has to create all those sounds. Symphony gigs are thin on the ground, but the world of music and sound is so much bigger than that.

The panel is quick to point out that even in music tech, the pre-professional argument is not the best one. We shouldn’t try to sell the dream of being a superstar DJ any more than gym teachers should dangle the idea of being a pro athlete. The real reason to do music tech in school is that it can build creativity, and thereby build kids’ sense of self. There’s also a side benefit of teaching media literacy. Kids aren’t born knowing how to right-click. Learning that kind of thing in a DAW context carries over into many other areas of life.

The panel was followed by a music tech music educator meetup, people from every continent who are teaching kids to produce. I sometimes feel like a lone oddball ranting on Twitter, and being among the tribe is super energizing. It was especially nice to get to hang out with New Zealand’s leading music tech advocate, Martin Emo.

On day two, the fires got to be so intense that ash briefly rained down on us, and the conference folks started handing out smoke masks.

This was my first time being in the midst of a large-scale fire, and it was unnerving. I was walking around in my smoke mask wondering, is this going to be a regular thing in the coming climate apocalypse? All the LA locals were blasé about the fire, but it felt like being in the early scenes of a Hollywood disaster movie. Here’s Amoeba Music in the smoke:

After feeling blank terror about how we broke the planet, I was in the wrong mood for Amoeba. It was strange to be in such a huge record store and not have the slightest desire to buy anything. I was just feeling, what is the point of all this? I could hear all these things on the internet so easily, what would I want with all this physical media?

Though I did appreciate this Missy Elliott votive candle.

I spent a good part of the day hanging out on the Montalbán Theater roof deck instead of going to sessions. I felt guilty about it, but Loop is like drinking from a firehose, and I felt like I needed to do some sipping instead. There was plenty of interest just in people-watching.

I went back inside in time to hear the great Patrice Rushen talk about self-care for musicians. She pointed out that musicians have their feelings dialed up to 10 all the time, and it’s helpful to remember that not everything is such a big deal, especially the failures and setbacks, of which there are many. Listening to her speak sent me digging through her illustrious discography. For example, she appears on this Jean-Luc Ponty album that’s like a funkier, smoother version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Patrice Rushen has got stories. Earth, Wind and Fire rehearsed in her house and played her high school prom! She asks: “Ever wonder why we close our eyes when we pray, when we dream, when we kiss?” Good question. Also, her big hit, “Forget Me Nots,” is the absolute funkiest.

Next was a talk by Photay about his production techniques. I wasn’t too familiar with his music going in. It seems very “Ableton-y”, for lack of a better word–beat-driven, on the grid, but also abstract and intellectual. He talked about recording group vocals in a concrete bunker at Fort Tilden in Brooklyn. He did all these improv exercises, like having one person sing a note and then everyone else jumping in on random harmonies. This is the kind of fun thing you get to do when you’re making a sample library rather than trying to capture a finished performance.

I spent the session mentally comparing the thinking behind Photay’s hipster-y headphone music and Tec Beatz’s trap beats. One isn’t better or worse than the other, but their audiences are different. (I like trap better, but Photay’s music sounds more like what I produce, since he and I are both white nerds.) Both Tec and Photay like pre-existing sample libraries, processed/surreal vocal loops, filtered/pitched drums, and grid-based sequencing. Their music is not all that different structurally or even timbrally, and yet Tec’s music is “hard” and Photay’s is “soft.” More accurately: Tec is making social music, while Photay is making solitary music. (My music, like my personality, defaults to solitary/introspective/misanthropic, and but I aspire to the emotionally connected/responsive vibe of hip-hop.) As I described above, Tec is systematic and methodical in his production approach. Photay is organized too, but not so disciplined or structured. They both defy racial stereotypes that way.

Photay likes sampling his own unreleased tracks, wisely not letting a good idea go to waste. He describes himself as having some formal engineering training, but mostly mixing “by ear,” which is an expression I love. Will there someday be a split between formally and informally trained producers, like there is now for instrumental and vocal performers?

Next up: Andrew Huang presented the results of a global shared sample challenge, with many producers creating tracks using a single short snippet of audio. This kind of project is a favorite of mine, both as an artist and an educator.

Andrew’s panelists were Ebonie Smith (who has a fascinating life story) and Nick Weiss of Teengirl Fantasy, each of whom presented their take on the shared sample project. Ebonie shares my belief that constraints are the best way to foster producerly creativity–she gives herself an hour, or half an hour, or fifteen minutes to make a track. It was nice to learn that Nick shares my love of plugin presets and unlicensed samples. I learned at last year’s Loop that you should put Ableton Saturator on literally everything, and Nick also seems to have taken that lesson to heart. Also, Nick’s “guitar” part is a Kontakt synth preset, because real guitars are for old people.

Andrew also presented his take, which included fast kick-drum style automated decreases in pitch on non-kick drums, a very nice idea. He also automated the clip envelopes on his samples to sweep their transposition and grain size up and down, producing a beautiful rippling sound. I always forget that clip automation is a thing, and I shouldn’t neglect such a powerful tool. Another Andrew-ism is to take an ambiguous chord with a bunch of seconds in it and disambiguate it with a functional bassline. I find his music to be a little too smooth and tasteful for my sensibilities, but he’s a bottomless source of inspiration.

Abid Hussain, who is both a corporate attorney and alternative rock producer, presented on copyright and sample clearances. I was a little put out about this, because I pitched almost this exact same talk. However, Ableton was right to book Abid Hussain, he did a better job than I would have on the legal side, and with his music examples. (However, he didn’t talk about civil disobedience, more on that below.) He began by saying, “I hope you will walk away from this both informed and confused, because that is the state of copyright.” The bottom line would seem to be, per the 2005 Bridgeport v Dimension Films decision, that unauthorized sampling of any kind is never allowed. The “Blurred Lines” ruling also comes down hard against borrowing the general vibe of another song, which is unfortunate, because it was a bad and illogical decision.

The good news is that in 2013, the Cariou v Prince decision established that fundamentally transformational works are covered under Fair Use, as long as you add something original and new, and your transformed work doesn’t usurp the market for the original work. So actually, all my illegal remixes on SoundCloud might be Fair Use? Abid plays us a track he built entirely from samples of “Single Ladies,” which is obvious copyright infringement, except all the samples are processed beyond recognition, so it’s fair use, or is it? No one knows. The thing is, if you transform a song to the point where it’s unrecognizable, what’s the point in even sampling it at all? The whole point of sampling (in rap, anyway) is that you’re supposed to recognize the original! It’s all about intertextuality.

I am not a lawyer, but: unauthorized sampling is valuable and important, as an artistic practice, as a form of civil disobedience, and as the only reasonable response to living in a recording-saturated world. The steady chilling of your right to creatively engage with your own culture is limiting the size of your box. Unauthorized sampling is such an important act of civil disobedience because it expands your box. You should do it! Don’t charge money though.

After taking in all this information, I went back up to the roof to enjoy Richard Devine’s modular synth set. It was all organic rippling sounds and ambient textures, not at all as techno-y as you’d expect a modular performance to be. I was transported.

The final event of the night was a performance by Equiknoxx. My knowledge of reggae ends at about 1982, so they were a total surprise for me. They use super futuristic and ambient textures and unpredictable rhythms, but underneath all their swirling synth and sample madness is that boom-ch-bum-ch beat, and above it they have a couple of excellent emcees. It was the first time all weekend this crowd of dance musicians got up and danced. I had fun. That night, I dreamed about having to set up an elaborate modular synth and guitar rig for a recording session. Predictable.

Speaking of reggae: Scientist is a legendary dub producer, and this is his legendary car, the Dub Robot. [Update: no, the car belongs to Scientist’s engineer.]

The last day I also spent a lot of time just hanging out, and so missed the machine learning talk where everyone found out that Google Magenta is now making audio and MIDI plugins for Ableton Live. Artificial intelligence is coming to musical creativity. Is this is a good thing? I have no idea, but it’s happening.

I went to two different presentations by the great Toni Blackman, a talk and a cypher workshop. I combined my notes on both here.

(If you’re unfamiliar with rap cyphers, I wrote a participant ethnography of a cypher at NYU that you might find enlightening.)

Toni’s ideas about freestyle rap were influenced by studying free jazz at Howard, by Toshi Reagon’s songwriting circle, and by competitive public speaking. She avoided the impromptu and extemporaneous speaking category until she was forced to do it at a competition, as the only girl on the only black team. Her strategy was to pretend that she knew what she was doing. It worked!

If you practice freestyling, you build authentic confidence that comes from the soul. It gives you access to vulnerability and creativity. I haven’t done much freestyle rap, but I’ve played enough jazz to get a taste of that confidence, and it might be the most valuable professional trait that I have. The cypher is not just people taking turns spitting; that’s an open mic. In a real cypher, people have to be making eye contact and connecting. As Toni says, “The circle is a sacred space” where you learn how to literally get along. (There’s a reason we eat our meals that way, and that kindergarten teachers start the day that way.) Getting along is a growth area for pretty much humans. In the cypher, you learn to make mistakes in front of other people, and in so doing, start trusting them. In a good cypher, someone always has your back, so it’s okay to have weaknesses. And taking creative risks in a collaborative setting is way more fun than taking them on your own.

People: bring Toni to your organization/school/whatever, and pay her all the money. She will light the fire inside you. “We are all drops of water but together we’re the ocean.” She delivered that line in a freestyle, with the audience doing the beat.

At her workshop, Toni took us through a series of exercises culminating in our doing some actual freestyle rapping. If the idea of freestyling seems daunting to you, it does to me too. I wouldn’t be able to just walk into a room and do it. But Toni has methods for bringing people like me into the right frame of mind. If you’ve ever meditated, or done improv comedy, or theater games, then her exercises will be familiar. The uniqueness of her approach is that she brings these practices into the hip-hop context.

The first warmup was a simple alphabet game. The first person in the circle lists all the words they can think of starting with A, then the next person lists all the words they can think of starting with B, and so on, around and around. The point here is not to compete to get the most words. The point is to establish flow. As soon as you hesitate, the next person should jump right in without needing prompting. There was no beat on, no pressure to make sense or say anything profound. And yet, some of the word lists were weirdly effective lyrics. For example: “Mother, monster, martyr, maker.” There’s a hook right there! It’s easy to list words starting with a certain letter, but it’s hard to do it on the spot, and to keep the flow going. I could see just doing this for an hour, frankly.

The next exercise was to do introductions. We went around the circle saying who we are and what we do in a few lines. These we rapped, without a beat, but trying to have them sound good and rhyme. Toni likes to do the introduction exercise at every cypher, even if it’s the same people as last time, because hopefully everyone has grown since then. We followed that with a few people freestyling off the word “Summer.” There was no need to rhyme, it was just free verse style. Toni instructed us that if we got stuck, we should just pause and conclude, “…summer.” Like it’s the most profound thing we’ve ever said. She also coached us on confidence and bodily affect: keeping an open, loose stance, no locked body positions, “release the question mark from your face,” and deliver your words “like it’s the dopest shit.” We broke into small groups, and each group had to do a short spoken word performance off a one-word prompt: “light,” “food,” “power.” We weren’t allowed to write anything down, just had a few minutes to write, rehearse and memorize our thing.

After that, rapping began in earnest. Toni put on a somber minor-key beat and had us rhyme some advice to our younger selves. It was like musical group therapy. The verses ranged from silly to profound, with some surprisingly strong rhymes sprinkled in there. Like me, the participants were not emcees. They were mostly producers, some general musicians, and a couple of singers and songwriters. And yet, almost everyone managed some credible freestyling. For the final exercise, we improvised the story of a young producer, telling his story from being a kid through finding success. Again, each person just rapped a few lines and as soon as anyone hesitated, the next person was supposed to jump in and keep the flow going.

After the session, I took a walk down Sunset with one of the other participants. He was a little disgruntled because he was expecting a more conventional lyric-writing workshop, something about structure or whatever. I understood that, but I think Toni was doing something more valuable. Her philosophy, shared by all the really good hip-hop artists I’ve met, is that if you are in the right frame of mind, feeling centered and connected and confident, then the music will just flow out of you and be dope because it will reflect how you feel in the moment. TecBeatz said the same thing about producing tracks. I can tell you from my own experience that if you’re not in that centered flow state, you can still come up with stuff that’s clever, that’s well-crafted, that’s impressive. But it won’t grab people, because they’ll be feeling the same anxiety you were feeling while you made it. I’m at a place with my technical understanding of music where I know everything I’ll ever need to know about theory, technology, styles and genres and all of that. But the internal side, the emotional side, continues to be a major growth area for me.

Toni is a critical figure, because she has devoted decades to mastery of the emotional side, both individually and in groups. Her technical chops as an emcee are very strong, too, and I’m sure she’s put in her time with the rhyming dictionary. It seems like the development of her chops has been a consequence of her confidence, not the source of it necessarily. I’m sure they’re co-emergent, but the confidence matters more than the chops. This is true in most kinds of music, not just rap.

So, that was my Loop experience. It was great! Thanks, Ableton. I’ll be back next year.