More Exciting Than Sleep
Mar. 12th, 2008 03:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
errantemberLaura Scarborough is one of my favorite local artists and muses. I hadn't seen her play an in-town musical gig in along time, largely because she's been doing more MC and theater work recently. I got a chance to hear her play at Barcelona downtown Monday night. About half way through the gig, I decided it would be a good choice to take the inspiration home while I still had some time and try some digital synesthesia myself. I've long had many sweet components waiting to assembled into a Digital Funk Engine of Doom, but I've rarely spent the time necessary to actually, say, *make music* or anything fancy like that.
The only instrument I've ever really been able to "play" was the oboe, which I learned in junior high. I've since found that I've forgotten everything in terms of actually being able to make music with one.
This "you must practice before you can be spontaneous" angle of music (and, in fact, most of reality) has always been a major bummer to someone as scattered and lazy as me. In junior high I had Mr. Gunn to force me, with his hated practice record regimen. I also find it offensive that being able to express oneself musically is some kind of exclusive club for hard-working, dedicated people. Anyway, something else I have is Ableton Live, which is a killer music program that can do just about anything. The reason this software is important to me is that it allows the lazy to be musically expressive without involving actual work.
My singing voice is actually quite good, even *without* practice, and one very cool thing that can be done with Ableton is multi-level loop sampling. Fans of Kid Beyond will be familiar with this technique. The basic idea is that you record a little segment, then set it to looping. You then record another one, which can play at the same time. You can do this as many times as you want, adding and stopping loops as you go. Add to this the ability to imitate a lot of different sounds with your voice, and this can get really crazy really fast. The best part about it is that it's totally spontaneous. You just hit the record button on the slot you want, sing, then hit stop. Then do it again. And again. And that's it. No fuss. No practice. No talent.
Fantabulous!
I just laid down a few sort of droning, chanting tracks using my MIDI keyboard as a control device. You can map any of the program's hundreds of buttons that control the program to any MIDI controller, which means you can conceivably run your entire concert from your musical keyboard without even touching your computer.
Add to this all the *other* instruments I can pretend to "play" with the ability to do infinite re-takes until I get it right, and the possibilities are endless.
Instruments? I own:
several guitars
a bass clarinet
a Yamaha WX-5 wind-controlled MIDI instrument (looks like a high-tech clarinet. sounds like anything)
several MIDI keyboards and various tone modules
a decent, small-scale mixing device
a Mac with a bunch of crazy music programs
etc., etc., etc.
The only instrument I've ever really been able to "play" was the oboe, which I learned in junior high. I've since found that I've forgotten everything in terms of actually being able to make music with one.
This "you must practice before you can be spontaneous" angle of music (and, in fact, most of reality) has always been a major bummer to someone as scattered and lazy as me. In junior high I had Mr. Gunn to force me, with his hated practice record regimen. I also find it offensive that being able to express oneself musically is some kind of exclusive club for hard-working, dedicated people. Anyway, something else I have is Ableton Live, which is a killer music program that can do just about anything. The reason this software is important to me is that it allows the lazy to be musically expressive without involving actual work.
My singing voice is actually quite good, even *without* practice, and one very cool thing that can be done with Ableton is multi-level loop sampling. Fans of Kid Beyond will be familiar with this technique. The basic idea is that you record a little segment, then set it to looping. You then record another one, which can play at the same time. You can do this as many times as you want, adding and stopping loops as you go. Add to this the ability to imitate a lot of different sounds with your voice, and this can get really crazy really fast. The best part about it is that it's totally spontaneous. You just hit the record button on the slot you want, sing, then hit stop. Then do it again. And again. And that's it. No fuss. No practice. No talent.
Fantabulous!
I just laid down a few sort of droning, chanting tracks using my MIDI keyboard as a control device. You can map any of the program's hundreds of buttons that control the program to any MIDI controller, which means you can conceivably run your entire concert from your musical keyboard without even touching your computer.
Add to this all the *other* instruments I can pretend to "play" with the ability to do infinite re-takes until I get it right, and the possibilities are endless.
Instruments? I own:
several guitars
a bass clarinet
a Yamaha WX-5 wind-controlled MIDI instrument (looks like a high-tech clarinet. sounds like anything)
several MIDI keyboards and various tone modules
a decent, small-scale mixing device
a Mac with a bunch of crazy music programs
etc., etc., etc.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-12 02:22 pm (UTC)Music software makes me super excited but I never really managed to get in the thick of it. These days I've been thinking a lot about the Accompanist Conundrum and trying to find ways around it, and this could be one of them.
La la! Downloading!
There's definitely...
Date: 2008-03-12 05:24 pm (UTC)I haven't checked the price recently. The version I got was $500 new, but I got mine used from friend who was upgrading. I have version 5, and they on version 7.x now. I can show you how it works sometimes, with or without the Kitchen Aid.
It occurs to me that with the right attachments, the Kitchen Aid could be made into a fabulous low-tech drum machine.
Hmmm......
You may want to check out Kid Beyond's little "instructional video" to answer that question.
Date: 2008-03-12 06:31 pm (UTC)He uses a MIDI foot pedal controller, but everything he does can certainly be done from the computer keyboard. I just got Midistroke, a free Mac application that allows you to map incoming MIDI events to any keystroke combination you'd like. This is really the final piece of the puzzle for me, because while you can map any control in Ableton to a MIDI event, the DEL key is not a button in the program -- only on the keyboard. Using Midistroke means I can map the DEL key to MIDI event, which closes the loop.
Re: You may want to check out Kid Beyond's little "instructional video" to answer that question.
Date: 2008-03-17 05:24 am (UTC)If I could justify the expense this would be an incredible piece of software to have around. Thank you for mentioning it! I will probably keep fooling with the demo to see if I can get it to be useful enough to think about buying it.
"With the right attachments..." Well, with the right attachments anything can be made into a fabulous low-tech drum machine, er, I'm really stretching the innuendo with this one... No, definitely. Ha!
Re: You may want to check out Kid Beyond's little "instructional video" to answer that question.
Date: 2008-03-17 05:43 am (UTC)Re: You may want to check out Kid Beyond's little "instructional video" to answer that question.
Date: 2008-03-18 05:24 am (UTC)