Rambling music geekery, ahoy!

[spacebug]

I got this urge to be creative and productive. So I've been poring over Ableton Live so that I can learn it and make more music all intuitively with it and stuff. (That is, until I get myself an Echoplex or a Repeater which I've apparently decided I won't be happy until I have, at which point I'll probably get annoyed with those and decide I want something else, of course. Gah.) And I don't know if I'm just in the mood to make stuff instead of trying to learn stuff that will allow me to make stuff or what, but even though this program is supposed to be all super intuitive, trying to learn it this weekend has just been frustrating me. It even has dorky little tutorials that actually seem all right that I'm going through, but at the same time, they don't seem to teach me what I want to know. (And of course the sample song they use for learning purposes is the suckiest bit of suck that ever sucked. Actually, come to think of it, it's the sample song that's bugging me more than anything- the tutorials themselves aren't terrible. But listening to that fucking thing looping over and over doesn't make me want to learn the program at all, it makes me want to throw things. Well, not that severe, but apparently it makes me want to quit trying and bitch about it on lj, which is about as productive.)

I'm learning pretty slowly that the slightest of learning curves turns me off. What the heck happened to my attention span? Did I ever have one for this stuff? Am I just dumb? Cases in point- I hated my confusing digital mixer, I love my little straightforward mackie. The audio program I consistently go back to is Acid, the one basically made for non-gearheads to make techno-in-a-box more than anything else. I generally dislike MIDI because too much can go wrong with it, synching is a bitch, merging, banks, patch changes, control numbers, data dumps.. Ew! I like destructive editing 'cause I like knowing that what I see is what I get. I love love love old synths like the Prophet and the sh-101 and the Juno 106 because of the sound, but also because all the knobs and everything they can do is right on the front panel. IMGRAT IMGRAT IMGRAT! I like the K for its decent classical soundbanks and sampley goodness, but I've barely ever done much with its convoluted synthesis architecture because it's way too confusing and menu-heavy to me.

And manuals are okay and everything, but it's so much easier for me to learn from doing. But at least manuals don't have craptastic tutorials songs with really awful rhodes keyboard in them. Not that I have any opinions about these kinds of things or anything.

It's kind of screwing with my sense of self, as I'm beginning to think I might think of myself as much more of a geargeek technohead than I actually am. Huh. I'm not overly concerned about this, right now, but it is a little kooky to notice. Maybe it means I'm more a musician than a tech, and I'm peachykeen with that assesment of things.


Man. Sometimes it feels like my creative existence would be so much simpler if I were just another lesbian with an acoustic guitar. Why do my chosen tools have to feel so difficult sometimes?



Maybe I can try to make some music again, now.
Thanks, lj.

Comments

[magicmarmot.livejournal.com]

I love ACID. And really, when I get back full-time, you'll have to come over and play in the studio.

[spacebug.livejournal.com]

Yay, toys. Will you be at Omegacon this year, or are you stuck in the cornfields?

[magicmarmot.livejournal.com]

Mo Definitely I will be there. They tried to get me to stay, but I managed to just say "no". It was quite fun.

When I get back, there will be much in the way of creative projects. I am freaking starved down here-- it's Stepford.

[riotdorrrk.livejournal.com]

i've listened to years of elitist gear-o-philes bitchn n moanin about computer software that makes it easy for people to put music together, because then 'just *anyone can make music' - oh no! well, the truth is not everyone can make *compelling music - that still comes from the self. the ability to cut'n'paste samples together is just a shortcut. obfuscation is just a result of primitive technology and a lack of design/interface intuition.

[sarendipatree.livejournal.com]

Preach it sisdah.

Live is kinda the suck. I thought I'd use it much more than I actually have. S'one reason I'm still using Cubase 5. Learning Cubase on the Atari, I thought, well gee, this works basically exactly like it should. Then I checked it out on PC and thought, gee this works like the Atari, but with digital audio and virtual synths. Huh. That's all fine then. And I stayed there, and that's fine too. I think whatever-works-for-you is a fine way to do it.

As a side-note, you'd posted about potentially a new synth and I had tenatively said and Ion or a Micron would be good. I heartily endorse the idea of an Ion, cuz after this post, I think you'd really dig on its synth architecture. The Micron is lousy for geeking out on until or unless Alesis gets its shit together and puts out a software editor.

I always just worry about playing synth after the robot holocaust. I kinda want a qy-70 for that reason.

[spacebug.livejournal.com]

The Micron is lousy for geeking out on until or unless Alesis gets its shit together and puts out a software editor.

Really? That's sucky- I'd rather fallen in love with the idea of a cutesy little analog modelling synth for under $400 with phrase sampling and drum sequencing capabilities.

[sarendipatree.livejournal.com]

It has a one parameter/value display on a two-line, 30-character screen. Ugh. That's just not right way to go about it.

I suspect that the midi-looper functions works alright -- I haven't played with that yet -- But doing anything more than the most minor tweaks on the presets is a huge pain in the arse.

[burnunit.livejournal.com]

hell yah, MIDI is a pain. the learning curve (which many insist is not too steep) just made me go uhh...(mouth hanging open)...zzzz....klonk! that's why I've stuck with Rebirth so long- don't have to use MIDI if'n I don't want to, and easy peasy!

Live

[r4c.livejournal.com]

In order to learn Live, I basically just had to sit down and make something with it from start to finish. It wasn't a really good something but I at least was able to figure out the basics. It took me a while to figure out all the more advanced features, but for fast composition in a pretty intuitive manner (at least for using a combination of loops & linear construction), I would say it has been an enormous improvement over Acid for me. I kept getting frustrated by Acid's lack of real effects and parameter automation, having to draw my composition in measure by measure, not being able to record and add new parts on the fly while the sequence is still running, complete lack of VST support, etc. Until Live came along tho, it was the best thing going. I have always been a pretty fickle music software consumer in that I have quickly abandoned tools in favor of something else that was closer to how I wanted to work.
I just want to get from what's in my head to what's coming out of my speakers in the shortest possible time. Live allows me to "rough it out" real fast and then go back and edit it into a finished piece later.
I've pretty much abandoned MIDI entirely in favor of working with the audio directly in combination w/ VST plugins and software instruments. I am only really recording audio from external sources and instruments to use as raw material (Live 4's MIDI implementation is pretty basic at best anyways).
In any case, use whatever excels at working in the style you are most comfortable with. For me, that has been a process of trying a shiteload of different things (both hardware & software) and coming up with a set of tools that fit how I want to work. When I work with other people, I generally have to develop a new set of tools to work in that situation. For panzram, that has been developing audiomulch & reaktor patches & instruments for realtime audio processing from electroacoustic sources. For low orbit, that's meant finding new hardware & software instruments to make our music and play it live. For my own stuff, every new piece usually requires that I develop or discover new tools, idioms or techniques for constructing music.
In any case, it is always a (sometimes really frustrating) process but I think that usually the end result is worthwhile.

[hexagonalcarbon.livejournal.com]

I had exactly the same frustrations and realizations you just described, spacebug, like a few years ago. Except for the musician part, because unfortunately I'm no kind of musician.