Unveiled!  Just before our big trip to Switzerland (December 2-7) we finished up the work on the newest live set - check out the podcast to hear it in action.

This set includes lots of new material specifically written to coexist with the older stuff released from albums like The Grid or The Zero Engine.  And it fits together so smoothly too with help from Ableton’s macro controls allowing me to change tons of functions with one knob on the Novation Zero SL MkII controller.  That’s a pretty cool function.  Especially considering the necessity to keep things simple in a live environment  - you just want things to work without having to incessantly toggle through software menus or use the mouse when you have other things going on.

So in an attempt to keep things simple with this controller, there’s 8 faders, 16 knobs, 32 buttons and a single crossfader.  It took me about 2 weeks of work to map all the controls I wanted to them...with so many options available for mapping, it’s really a choice of what your priorities are. 

The faders to the right of course control the volume of each track.  The buttons below them control solo/mute channels for each.  The buttons on the left control scene launch/stop for each.  Above those, the black drum pads are set to trigger one-shot samples (with the crossfader controlling an effect send amount).  For the lower set of knobs there’s a combination of effects but mostly they go to send amount to conserve CPU (audio takes up a lot of calculations so I cut down the # of effects used this way).  And finally the pretty lights on the top are individual effects for each track. 

Maybe this view will be a little more intuitive as it corresponds to the controller.  Kind of looks like an excel spreadsheet, huh?  That’s the point of Ableton’s session view, each cell contains either MIDI or audio info, and each column up/down is a separate track. They’re organized so that they can be mixed and have FX based on what type of EQ frequencies they inhabit, and each “song” I’ve got is color-coded with darker parts indicating which are more rhythmic.  The right white and grey columns are extremely percussive and thus generally have no tones to worry about.  Here’s the layout:

1. Ableton’s Operator softsynth (I don’t have parts for every song yet but I’m getting there)
   

2. Bass - or mostly bass related sounds
   

3. Pad/Strings/Atmosphere
   

4. Acid sounds or arps
   

5. Arpeggios/drum loops
   

6. Drum loops without kicks
   

7. Ableton’s drum rack with drum hit samples and MIDI
   

8. Kick drum channel ONLY (important for sidechain compression)
   

The pic above is an example of track 7’s MIDI notes.  It reads from left to right like a piano roll, and you can see by about measure 16 or 17 of this sequence it gets a little more manic for a buildup.  If you think that’s complex you should have seen the automation curves recording this set created hahaha....  It took about 50 minutes to record the set and then my computer rendered it for about 20 more minutes!

And of course not everything can be triggered within the project itself and I have some fairly complex sounds that are years old and can’t be reproduced with Live alone...so that means many of the sounds used were audio loops I created from the original source files.  While Live does its best to figure out the tempo and use them, sometimes it needs some help. 

And that’s the best walkthrough I can hand you right now about this new live set we’ve created.  Go to the podcast page and listen right now!

Ever feel overwhelmed?  Too much going on or a problem too big or complex to really be solved on the surface?  We have.  In fact it’s happened many times with the DG project and here’s what we do to try and shake things up at our studio...

1. 1. Thanks to a few kind souls out there in the internetverseweb, there’s a site out there that allows you to access random OBLIQUE STRATEGIES created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help artists challenge themselves and overcome obstacles when dealing with their work.  Check out the site I use often here.
   

2. 2.When everything fails or seems too big, I resort to writing it down on my wipeboard or creating a flowchart.  Write down what the problem is and think of strategies to get around or solve it.  This has helped us in a number of ways!  Check out the following flowcharts I took pictures of over the last few weeks when we ran into brain drain here in NYC. 
   

Usually this method ends up inspiring me quite a bit more than if I let the thoughts roll around in my head.  When in doubt, WRITE IT DOWN!  You’ll thank yourself later, trust me!

We used these when we ran into problems with line noise in the studio, ran into writer’s block with a track we’re working on currently and when we needed to take down steps needed when syncing two laptops to each other via a wireless network in Ableton Live.