My Ableton Love

Ableton started making music software a few years back. I had been using Logic Platinum 4.8 for a number of years, I'd STILL be using it if it wasn't for Apple-gate. I have to admit that I rarely make music thesedays. I feel a sense of loss because of this, and its party because I've grown older, partly because I've taken my studio apart, and partly because I over-indulged.

There was a time from my 19th year until I was around 27 or 28 that all I would do is write music. It didn't matter if it sounded shit. It was an exploration. A love of sound and dynamics. I would sample anything and make loops, synths and instruments from them. I would run sounds back through guitar pedals and outboard (a sherman filter bank 2 being a favourite), then resample sections of mastered tracks I'd made.

One track ended up being remixed and resampled about 8 or 9 times. I must have worked on that for weeks. That track alone. Weeks. Oddly, I called it "Three" and I have no idea why.

I must have sent off hundreds of CDs to music A&R types over the years. Sometimes I received feedback, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes it was positive, sometimes they just didn't get it. Christ knows why I sent music off, I wasn't marketable in any shape or form. I was experimental, not like the boy and girl bands populating the charts at the time.

So when Logic had to be replaced I looked for something that had a similar feel. The only software I could get on with was Live 6. Which is odd as its nothing like Logic. Nothing at all. The only similarity is in the layout of the sliders and knobs on the mixer. The midi-clips look like the old FX slots on the Logic mixer a little, so perhaps that's what swayed me.

In Logic I wrote around 3000 pieces of music. From varying lengths of 1 minute ditties to 20 minute opuses. Live has not been as productive for me, probably because of the excellent way I can mess with effects and sampling within the program.

Getting Live 6 also coincided with me getting involved in cycle activism of sorts. Letters had to be written, videos had to be made, and potholes reported. I threw myself into that. Over 2 years I logged and reported about 300 road defects to local councils.

But now there are pangs. Cravings. I want to write music again. The last real push I had with writing was a double album I wrote on my own under my old Absense of Meaning pseudonym. A deliberate misspelling and a deliberate political edge. Tracks like The Room Where It Began and Where There's Cents had complete contrasts, but they felt right together in the same place. Warhol had a 60s feel, both tribute and critique of the man... I'm not a singer by any means, not even a vocalist, and it was a real struggle to put voice to hard disk on these things.

Absense of Meaning wasn't the only project I worked on. I worked under Downfader for years. Blood Collar was a metal and industrial inspired project. Lastly Three Travellers was the Ableton years, you might say. I played guitars, synths, violin (badly) and even drums and percussion at times. From programming synths and sequencer software to actual plucking of strings, it was all good.

Just as with the Bush Administration and Blair years, today's Governments give me cause for concern. I feel the need to write something, but perhaps its too late now? Perhaps I've grown too old in my mind to have the same fire to experiment?