They reflect time, I am the very ticking

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:33:05 +0000

Yesterday was a very interesting day for me since it marked two musical firsts: My first track made with Ableton Live, and my first track taken "successfully" from concept to execution.

My normal music creation process is very hit and miss and mostly miss at that. I usually sit down and mess about with drum beats or synth patches until something catches and then, incrementally, add stuff until it seems to be done somehow. The net result is that I am unhappy with a good deal of my work.

But I keep slogging away trying to make as many tracks as I can and learn all I can in doing so.

On Friday, thanks to some generous discounting by Ableton, I was able to buy Live 8. I've dabbled with the Live session view a few times and considered it interesting. This weekend I was able to really dig into it and I find myself very happy with the result.

In a sense what the session view allows you to do is think about arrangement at a more abstract level than a typical arrangement view (such as Logic's). Where in an arrangement you have to think concretely about what sound goes where, in a session it's easier to think more in terms of the relationship between different parts. I've found it very invigorating.

So for some time I've had a desire to make a track featuring the sound of clocks ticking. I used a clock ticking in a track I made last month and I thought it was very effective. It laid a seed... what about making a track using nothing but clocks.

I finding the ticking of clocks very interesting. On the one hand I absolutely cannot sleep in a room with a ticking clock; I begin to anticipating the tick & this pushes me to the brink of madness. Yet, at other times, I can find ticking a comforting sound and I find the sound of many clocks ticking at once strangely intriguing.

I spent several weeks collecting clock samples and was kind enough that a bunch of Alonetoner's and Twitter friends helped me out.

Then I tried to make an arrangement in Logic. But I found it quite hard to get beyond a cacophony of sound. I definitely wasn't trying to make Ligeti's symphony for metronomes so I wanted to avoid that. I became frustrated until my interest in the project waned and it got shelved.

Yesterday morning it struck me that this was a perfect opportunity to try out Live.

I started a new Live set, collected all the samples into Live clips, and began sorted them into groups:ticks, fast ticks, grandfather ticks, mechanical ticks, chimes, and even a cuckoo.

From the groups I was able to structure things so that the I could keep the relative balance of the different types of sound the same while the sounds themselves could change and progress along with the track. One of the reasons live is very good for this is that the session view compresses time. You don't have to think about "bars" but "scenes" (of arbitrary length).

After several hours work I had a structure that I was able to play through, scene-by-scene, and come up with something I was quite happy with. It looks like this:

Then I went back and looked at creating some ambient sounds that would glue the whole thing together. I decided to put each group of sounds through a different send but keep the send levels quite low so that the wet sounds are part of the scenery and don't intrude. Among other things I used Live's beat-repeat and resonator effects as well as a few of the usual suspects.

I printed this to an arrangement and rendered all 22 tracks to audio which I pulled into Logic for mixing. I'm pretty comfortable mixing in Logic and the Logic arrange window still feels superior to me.

Talking over an early mix MMI with MMI one of his criticisms was that there wasn't much stereo movement. I spent some time working on panning some elements as well as using Camel Audio's CamelSpace to autopan others (although I didn't use it for sound treatment per se, none of the other camel effects are active).

I spent some time adding reverb using both Space Designer and Eos. I find reverb very tricky, it seems to be "nothing", "nothing", "nothing", ..., "oops laid it on with a trowel" and little in between. I was very careful to keep my reverbs short and using slightly different timings for the tracks I used it in an attempt to create some distance.

The last stage was the mastering channel strip. I used my normal strip of gain, multipressor, reverb, limiter but the sound was getting very distorted. In the end I realised I was running the limiter far too hot and the further back I dialed it the better the track sounded. Once I figured that out it wasn't hard to get a mix that sounded good to my ears.

That track is The Madness of Clocks

Every sound in the track is either a clock ticking/chiming or that sound processed.

I'm really pleased with the result not only because I like the track a lot but because the process seemed to work so much more smoothly than usual. It gives me hope that the combination of Live and Logic will be a fruitful one for me.

I've written such a long post to give a little more detail into my process. I hope some of it may be interesting either to you or, later, to me!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on ableton-live

They reflect time, I am the very ticking