It’s a first!

I’ve wanted to experiment more with recording ‘live’, or perform the music in a more organic way then just rendering it out as a finished track. To that end I invested in Ableton Live a while back, and since then my workflow has changed a lot. The tracks I make now are made entirely in the Session view of Live, meaning that the process is more oriented around creating building blocks than a finished song.

Once I have an array of clips, I start to experiment with putting them together in different ways to create an interesting song, going back and forth between editing the clips, adding textures, sounds and samples, and putting them back together in new ways.

One thing I’ve realized when working this way is that its easy to loose track of time. A song that should probably only be about 6-8 minutes can easily run for 20 if you’re not careful. Part of it is that you are so up in the moment when performing it, and part I think is that you spend time thinking about where to go next, searching for the right knob, waiting for the next natural beat to hit and so on. This time feels incredibly short while performing, but a lot longer when you play the track back.

Having a video of the performance really helps make this time more interesting.