Live in Buddakan...
A few posts back I mentioned that I picked up Korg microKONTROL midi keyboard.I bought one of these for a couple of reasons. I wanted a small midi keyboard to sit more permanently on the desk. I also wanted some more control over the soft synths in reason – so was looking for something with a bunch of sliders and knobs.
But the main things that sold the Korg to me were the MPC style drum pads, it’s price, and the fact that it came with a version of Live.
I’ve wanted to try Live for a while to see if it can get me to dump the now prehistoric Sony Acid that I’ve been using for years and years. Sony don’t seem to want to take the program seriously anymore – and when I saw the (lack of) features they had added to version 5 – I knew it was time to spend my upgrade money somewhere else.
Since I’ve been ill this week it’s given me an opportunity to have a quick play with both the Korg keyboard, and start to get my head around Live.
Here are some mp3 samples of my adventures (right click to save).
Chrimed
This was a 10-minute piece. An experiment in using the midi effects that come with Live. The main riff is a bunch of random notes stuck through the chord, scaler, and random plug in. A little editing was required, but not much. I added a couple of loops to give it something to hang off of.
Idm
A 30 minute piece that was basically a test of Live’s audio fx. Lots of gating and crunching on the drums and I added a filter and bit reducer onto the main mix output and tweaked these live as the mix recorded. Again the lead synth part is some random notes put through some of the midi plugins.
Fuzzy Logic
A 2-hour piece that was an experiment in arrangement I guess. I find it easy to arrange in Acid and I was sceptical of arrangement in Live even though that in essence is what is meant to be special about the package. This piece, unlike the others, is entirely sample based and the arrangement is recorded live and tweaked a little afterwards.
So my conclusions? It’s going to take me a little while to get fully familiar with Live. There are a few weird things that got me when recording midi clips, and I did find myself scratching my head over a few looping options – like adding a bar of silence to a clip so it only looped ever 2 bars not one. I’m sure with a little more time to play with it I can work all this out though.
It’s always scary moving over to new software. When you know something well, you work around it’s faults but Sony stabbed me in the back with the lack of development and have forced me on this route. Looks like I’ll be sending Ableton some cash to upgrade to the full version so I can rewire in Reason. I think Acid is finally dead.
Nic.
2 Comments:
Awwww MAN! Just when I got Acid V.4!
I really need to get my Korg M1 Fixed.
Dabido (Teflon)
I wouldn’t worry about it too much Dabs. Acid served me well for years and it’ll probably be well up to most tasks you want it to do. The main reason I’m switching it because I think I took Acid about as far as I could. I no longer felt creative using it – like I’d done everything with it and I was just repeating myself.
Had Sony actually developed the project over the last 2 years instead of realising a very limp Version 5 upgrade I’d be all over it. But I’m seeing the development of Live progress at pace, and maybe the switch is what I need to find that creativity again. Who knows.
Nic.
Post a Comment
<< Home