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

[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!