THE ABLETON COOKBOOK

I have some bad news.

I’m going to close enrollment for the Ableton Cookbook Live Course in 6 days.

You’re probably pulling your hair out, gnashing your teeth and beating your breast, crying “Why?”

Well, calm down.

I’m closing enrollment because the amount of students has become somewhat…unmanageable. As you know, when I answer emails, I REALLY answer emails.

But this takes time. Like, to the tune of hours a day. And, unfortunately, I have other things to attend to.

“What things?”, you may ask.

I have been on a super secret mission, calling upon all of my internetting powers to improve the course even more. I’m really excited for the upcoming changes to the site and to the course, but these changes also take time.

So, in the interest of providing a high quality product, both now and the future, I’m closing enrollment for the Ableton Live Course (and Complete) on May 16th at midnight. Get in on this while the getting is open.

Sign up Now

P.S. Remember, Email List Members, apply your discount at checkout to get big ole discount!

Where are the Ableton Shares of yesteryear? Oh, Ableton Share, how little we knew ye.

And so on.

Ableton Share promised to make sharing among Live users effortless, by some undisclosed means. It was touted as one of the main selling points of Live 8 (a fact that you can read about in all its ranty glory at the Ableton forum), but the feature disappeared quickly after being introduced. But due to its ungoogleability and some great damage control on the part of Ableton, I haven’t even been able to figure out what it was, much less what was wrong with it.

But I am curious, since it seems like it could have revolutionized the way we make music.

Right now, producing music is often a solitary activity (your cat does not count as a companion). But what if we had a service like Ableton Share to help us not only connect with collaborators, but to discover new ones as well?

Many people have gotten into using Ableton’s “Collect All and Save” feature and a Dropbox account in order to share their sets with their collaborators. My experience with this has been mixed, tbh. It still seems like a kludge to me, which is great, but I’ve always said “Dare to Dream” (my therapist gave me a poster to that effect). I’ll tell you my preferred method after the fold.

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If you watched the last video where we shook hands with Ableton’s Max for Live, you might remember that the device we left off with was functional, but far from optimal. Our main goal was just to get the darn thing working. So, in this video, we are going to discuss a few ways to optimize our arpeggiator. First, we are going to discuss how to make the unit interact more closely with Live’s global tempo (since that is the reason most of us use Live). Then, we are going to talk about making our User Interface, if not nice, at least comprehensible and “Ableton-like.” We’ll do this by using some of Max for Live’s built-in interface objects. And, last but not least, we’ll make sure that our poor little device has some sort of labels to explain what it is and what it does.

Make sure to tune in next week, when we discuss how to extend any MIDI controller with the power of MaxforLive!

The other day, I sat down with the homie James Taylor to talk about my second favorite subject: Cash Money. James is what we in the biz call “a baws” (like Rick Ross): he’s the General Manager at the Beauty Bar here in Austin and is the don of his own company, Giant Steps Productions, which is a one-stop shop for management, booking and publicity for a grip of local acts.

We sat down to have a beer(s) and debrief about a presentation that he gave recently about novel ways to make some money in this business that we call: Music. I’m going to put up a few of his insights over the next week or so, but let’s begin with James’ ideas regarding getting sponsored as a musician.

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Max for Live is quite a confusing piece of work for the average human being like me and you. But Max doesn’t lack for documentation. It is actually very well documented, but I’ve alsways found that the documentation seems to be written for people who are already a Live ninjas/gurus/yogis, whatevs.

So, I (along with some help with my homie Nate) decided to embark on this tutorial series to show you how to get down the very basics of Max 4 Live. And I’ve decided to do it by focusing on a number of small projects, after the completion of which we’ll have a pretty good handle on the necessary components of Max 4 Live. But what that means is that we’re going to skip the preliminaries and jump right in by starting to build a simple MIDI arpeggiator!

In this video, we’ll cover: How to get MIDI in and out of an M4L device, How to monitor what’s happening in M4L, Simple math in M4L, Using sliders and the unpack objects.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

So, as those of who follow me on Twitter may be tired of hearing about, I’ve been working with my main man Nate to get together some basic video tutorials together on how to use Max for Live. But it might be worth taking a moment asking ourselves, Why do we care?

As many of you know, Max for Live is basically a port of Max/MSP, a graphical programming environment that can be used for normal computation (boring) or Audio Video applications (huzzah!). What this means in human-speak is that, instead of programming by staring at a black screen full of green text, you can program by connecting pretty little boxes and, when they inevitably don’t do what you’d like them to do, you just unhook them and connect them to something else. Think about like the modular synthesizer of the programming world. And Max for Live extends this functionality by allowing Max to run inside of Ableton as a Device, the format that we are all so fond of.

For many true-blue geeks, like myself, this is exciting simply because it is. Game of Thrones isn’t on Netflix, so what else am I going to do?

But for the novice, you might need some convincin’. So here’s why I think learning Max for Live is worth your time.
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Friends! As most of you know, I’m into somewhat infatuated with generative music. Generative music is exciting to me because it allows us to do things that would be almost unimaginable with conventional instruments, but it does so without getting rid of the excitement of live performance: it is truly technological music.

But getting a consistent live setup for my generative sets has been tough, since it has to fulfill two criteria: Maximum control over musically pertinent parameters and enough randomness to make new things possible. It also must be optimized for radness. But after months and months in the lab (my bedroom), I’ve been able to whittle the setup down to what I demonstrate in this video.

I’m really happy to share this with y’all because it incorporates several different MIDI FX and demonstrates some cool routing techniques. It also employs a technique that I explored here. Enjoy!

Make sure to let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

One of my favorite uses of Multiband Compression is to use it to add a little extra punch and clarity to the low end of my mix. I’ll show you how I do that in the video below. Multiband compression is an effect that allows you to isolate and compress different “bands” or areas of the frequency spectrum. This means that you can compress, say, the bass and the kick drum together without squashing the entire signal. While this won’t be the end of your tricks for mastering audio, it’ll be a good start!

To understand why we’d want to do that, it might first be important to remember what Compression does. It allows you to raise the perceived volume of a signal because it attenuates the volume spikes that might cause distortion. With compression, you can raise the average volume of a signal, but often at the expense of dynamics, since the distance between the quiet and the loud sections of the signal will be closer together.

One way that we can have our cake and compress it, too, is to apply more compression to areas of the signal that may not have that much dynamic variation, such as a kick drum. Usually a kick drum is playing or not. There’s very seldom a reason, in electronic music, to have quieter and louder hits of the kick drum. So, squashing this frequency range and leaving the rest untouched, will allow you to raise the perceived volume of these parts without sacrificing the overall dynamics of the track.

In this little video, I show you how to do just that. I also illustrate (unwittingly!) some common missteps when applying this kind of compression, so be sure to look out for these and not to fall in the same traps that I do!

I read a lot of forums. I see a lot of people talking about how, to make a great mix, they need this or that set of monitors or they need to treat their room in this or that way. And I agree wholeheartedly! It will make your life so much better to have a great room, treated correctly and to have sweet monitors that have a great frequency response.

But I also think that you should do what you can with what you’ve got.

That is why I think that you should always check your mix (several times in fact) on a wide variety of speakers. This way, you can cross reference how the mix sounds in a variety of environments and make sure that you tailor your mix accordingly. Here’s where I check my mixes:

On my good headphones (Grados)
On my monitors
On my crappy iPhone headphones
In my car (great system)
In my roommate’s car (crap system)
On a boombox
On a club PA (I usually do this when a project is close to done)

For every one of these, I take notes. I write down which instruments are too prominent and instruments are getting “swallowed.” Then, I compare these notes with one another. If I see the same problems arising on multiple systems, then I assume that it is a problem with the mix and I correct accordingly.

While this may seem janky, I have it on good authority that even the best sound engineers will eventually listen to a mix on a crappy boombox. The reason behind this is simple: only .05% of the population will ever listen to your track on anything resembling a hi-fi system. Most of us mere mortals will listen to it on a laptop at best and, at worst, on iPhone speakers. Even the most clubby of music now has to be able to be listened to in these different environments. So, take heart! You are just doing some field testing.

You scientist, you.

Leave a comment and tell me where your going to check your mixes! Extra points for bizarro answers.

As I’m sure all of you Ableton fanatics have heard, Ableton and Soundcloud are totally into one another. Owners of Ableton are eligible for a Free Soundcloud Pro account (for 5 months) and Soundcloud users are eligible for Live Lite, which previously only came with the Justin Bieber Paper Jamz Keytar. So, we’re stoked, right?

But, to be honest, I’m not that stoked. Frankly, if I wanted a Soundcloud Pro account, I would have one already. And I don’t really have the need to upload 36 hours of music (I’m not Sigur Ros). My greatest hope is that the Soundcloud deal will bring in some more Ableton newbs who will be below us on the great Ableton chain of being, thus giving the people on the Ableton Forum more people to abuse. j/k. I really do hope that it will bring in more people who want to learn about music production. The more, the merrier!

I’m really interested, though, in the “Publish to Soundcloud” capability that the new Ableton update apparently has (I’m superstitious and NEVER update my Ableton immediately). Do you guys think that that was a key feature to add? Will it change your workflow? YOUR LIFE?

Let me know in ye olde comments.