Experimentation - Ableton Live Demo

My first foray ever into the digital audio workspace was with Fruity Loops. Fun. Loopy. Not fruity, but it was part of the name. As it matured, it became FLStudio. I loved it for its easy of use. But....I always had latency issues with it. This could have been related to my hardware setup, though - I had a crappy soundcard with lousy drivers.

Since then, I've done my music mashing on a Dell 1720 laptop running Vista and 2G of memory. I'm shocked that it doesn't suck - way to go PC people.

I find that with my X-station25 audio interface and ASIO drivers, I have very low latency. I cannot tell you how awful it is to have latency when you're playing/recording music. I would rather punch myself in the face 20 times every hour than have latency issues and try to create music. Even you could punch me in the face 20 times every hour (I probably wouldn't punch very hard because, well, I hate being punched in the face).

Anyways.

I gave Sonar a try awhile a back. I liked it a lot. I tried Ableton Live a couple of times ago - at first, I thought I didn't like it. Some things that it does seem to be slow - waiting on a computer is the pits. However, other things are cool. It is very VERY easy to create loops of any midi track. I love loops. It makes quickly stitching a song together very very easy.

Here is a quick song I made this evening in about an hour and a half - 2 hours including learning some ableton stuff. It is 2 tracks of virtual fender-rhodes, and two tracks of virtual B5 (they don't overlap). I haven't mastered or done any adjusting - it is straight recording of the midi tracks from instruments offered by Ableton live. I find the B5, as I played/recorded it, a bit intrusive.....the fender-rhodes is the lead instrument, with the bass track looped, and the lead track doing its thing. I have a looped B5 track that starts early, then isn't involved at all, the starts up again near the end - it has the glissando. The other B5 track seems very intrusive, but I kept it in because the fender-rhodes-only section needed some beefing up.

Regardless of all that - it is good enough to cut it off, make the .wav file, convert to .mp3, and then post for fun. It is kind of boring but allowed me to experiment briefly. It is some musical wanking with virtual instruments.

***I also know that it is not electronica, nor is it wall-of-sound. It is old-school virtual instruments goodness. It makes me want to buy a Nord Electro-2.....badly.

Word to your mothers.

http://www.box.net/shared/2m6k981t7e

Big Plans - Sampling software

I sometimes get caught up in perfecting my craft, and forget that I need to choose a DAW.

I've sampled Sonar. I like it. I could buy it. But my anality prevents me without sampling Ableton Live and Cubase. Such is the curse of my anality.....I'm preventing from having things before I've scoped the other things out....it would be terrible to buy the wrong thing, even if that thing were good.

Tonight, I spent time playing with a non-DAW thing, when it would have been more productive to play with a DAW thing like Ableton-Live demo. I don't know what I'm thinking.

My drum machine is a lot of fun, however. I like to mess with it. It has buttons, and knobs. My synth has buttons, knobs, and sliders. A paltry 25 keys is, of course, constricting, but it does what it does in a fun manner.

I need to tear myself away from my toys to sample the DAWs. Then, I can record the shizzle for this blog, and begin. I think I need a plan of action - a schedule. Perhaps I should buy a mic, and plan to have a song by Hallowe'en. Here we go - a basic song by Hallowe'en, for the blog, just to get something down. Know the tools. Have some fun. For the B-sides rarities album. Its a plan.