Ableton Live RPM Update

With ten days remaining until the end of this year’s RPM challenge, the latest Canabrism album has reached the end of phase one. The first draft tracks have been created, and now it’s time to fine-tune their Ableton-inspired skeletons…

Learning Live

Ableton Live is indeed a very different beast to Pro Tools, and this marks my first project in which I’ve made any significant use of samples. I first encountered Live at version 2, but I didn’t really click with it then – it seemed not to be useful for actually making music, but rather for arranging and mashing music that had been made somewhere else.

Live is even better at manipulating samples now, but it also features a host of instruments that make it a much more versatile and complete DAW. It’s possible to call up a MIDI instrument such as Operator, play a riff, bounce it down and then manipulate it as an audio clip. However, having a large sample library to draw upon would certainly be handy too…

Ableton Twittering

I started out Twittering my creation process @canabrism, but the failure of my Nvidia 8400 graphics card disrupted this plan somewhat. However, I did discover that there is a Twitter feed dedicated to Ableton Live tweet tips – you can find this @AbletonTweets.

In terms of my personal favourite tips, this tutorial on unlinking clips and applying transposition to particular notes is probably the most useful. Before I discovered this, I was chopping up the clips and applying the transpose dial to each separate clip segment.

On a related note, if you want to keep track of who’s Twittering on a particular keyword or phrase, then you might try Monitter. Just type in your query and observe…