TogsTips

Part 11 – The Tech Genius Speaks

Welcome Back All – This week we were fortunate enough to have Ethan Hein, a New York based Doctoral Fellow in Music Education at New York University, come (over zoom of course …) and speak to us about his expertise in using Ableton Live.

ABLETON LIVE ROUND TWO

Vocoder

Ethan spent some time showing us a few groovy skills like how to use a vocoder in the program. He compared it to the sound of Imogen Heap in her song ‘Hide and Seek’ (below). This makes the sound much more techno sounding and super effectively creates a new sense of genre to the music. To make this more clear, robot characters such as R2D2 and C3PO from the Star Wars Trilogies, and Wall-E and Eve from Disney’s Wall-E are all prime examples of a vocoder in use.

To find this feature, it’s located under ‘Audio Effects’ and is only found in the Suite version of the program. Further, the only way to get good at this is to experiment with it yourself. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to do that yet but when I do, I’ll be sure to let you know how its done!

Warping:

Ethan then spoke to us for a while about warping and a bit of its history. Due to older recording formats not being as technologically advanced, pitch would bend when you would want to change the tempo of a song. This is really useful for when you want to play more buzzy, “nightmarish” music.

Transience

Transience is where the sounds are identified by the program, so if you decided to slow down an audio sample, it would guess what was between the sound files that you’ve stretched apart and fill the gap inbetween. Ethan spoke why this is necessary, highlighting that there should be ‘no digital black,’ or a period in the song where there is no file playing.

Beat Repeat

Beat repeat is used to fill the space between notes. It randomly adds beats to entend the music a bit. You can make adjustments to rhythms so an element of performance is included into the piece (for example making sure the sounds don’t occur faster than physically possible for a human to play), and allows you to extend your song somewhat.

Simpler vs Sampler

• Simpler allows you to change the pitches of a recording and take small bits of it to play over at different pitches. Easy system to use but can be difficult to make sound good and sophisticated
• Sampler is much more complex and has many more functions and restrictions but can be much more difficult

DAWS

Most DAWS such as GarageBand are often based off of tape recorder systems, with things to pull up and down and twist around to change sounds and their tecxtures however companies like Ableton have taken the next step. They’ve based Ableton off of an Excel Spreadsheet (possibly why I was so intimidated when I first was confronted by it …) Further, I’ve attached this vide to show you how something like this can be achieved in an ACTUAL excel spreadsheet.

TogsTeach

Another useful app I learnt through learning from Ethan was ThumbJam. This can be really useful as you can set everyones iPad to certain notes for when you want to learn about certain scales and musical featuires. Further, you can specialise keyboards for different students, for example if you have a disabled student or a student falling behind, you can disable certain notes so that they can ensure they’ll always sound good!