I built up my sample library by meeting a few fellow musicians within the industry who have a vast collection of samples and sounds knowing that some of the material would be within the boundaries of my kind of style. I have had experience working with these people on projects in the past. One of the guys used to be the drummer for my band Thine and recorded and toured with us, I have also recorded vocals for these people and tour managed on occasions, doing the driving, merchandise general labouring on equipment and such. If time had permitted I would have liked to have used the drummers Roland TD-12 to create my own drum loops and then enhanced them within the Ableton programme. I also trawled through my own cd collection for interesting samples I could use. I noticed that the majority of other students seemed to concentrate on some form of dj set by taking a song, adding some beats a new bass and a few effects, that may be good for the, but I had a need to make something of my own creation. For that reason I spent quite some time editing the samples in one way or another to create an original piece. My favourite part of this process was dealing with the vocal samples. These were purely speech driven samples and in some way intent on shocking or disgusting people as some form of statement to say ‘Get your politically correct head out of your backside and see the real world’. If I was not politically correct with the content of the track then all politicians are saints HAHAHAHAHAHA.

I made great use of the follow action in my set, this was my main area of expertise. I had to maximise the follow action tool in my set so as not to overcomplicate things, spending time working on the vocal actions getting the timings right, the orders in which to play and using it to create alternative drum loops, for example playing one loop 3 times and the 4th plays a drum fill loop and then returns to the 1st drum loop action.

I had no intentions of writing a track in any particular style, techniques, effects and such. I decided to just build and create and see what how to polish what I had done.

If I had more time to prepare I would have created better drum loops to use within the set and probably looked at adding my own vocals too. I will be using this programme after the course has finished, I am now inspired to use the video facility within ableton to create my version of a VJ set.

The clip can be cropped and looped like a normal sample, You can also using the pencil tool extend or shorten the notes, change the notes themselves and alter the attack level of the notes.

The Etheria sample I used was copied and cropped into three variations, I also altered the transposition to bring the melody into line with the rest of the set.

The file browser is perfect for building up a set, it is so useful having it sat next to the body of work being created. Say I have the start of a set, created a few basic scenes and a few basic tracks, I now want to look at adding some vocals to the kit, bass and lead that has been put together I can then search in the library for vocal samples, preview them in the browser before adding to the project and then simply click, drag and drop in the relevant track. If I took a sample in wave form and edited it by warping and cropping, I can then click and drag the edited clip back into the library to then save it to the library.

The buttons in the top left starting from the top are commands as follows: show/hide browser, Live device browser, Plug-in device browser, File browser 1, 2 and 3, and finally the hot swap command. The 3 file browsers give the chance to set up three different file locations which can be handy if say your project is based with the main programme files, have samples on another hard drive/ files in an alternate location.

This is the arrangement view. This is the section where you can view and edit the set when you have recorded it. It lays the tracks out where you would see the scenes in the session view and shows the clips as and when they are played. Where the tracks are shown there are arrows to the left of the writing. These give the ability to alter the envelopes within the tracks rather than the individual clips, such as track panning, volume, send levels, processor levels. If using an instrument within ableton it also shows (and able to edit) the notes played on the midi clip.

What a tool! At first I found I encountered problems with locating samples used in my live set until I understood the benefits of the file manager..

Click the manage library tool and the program scans through library and gives you the information held in the library, how many live sets, samples, clip and preset files. It also shows you what samples are missing and gives you the opportunity to solve the problem.

You can also scan through the current projects files, which works on the same basis as scanning the library. This lets us replace missing samples, and see the information held within the project. You can also create a live pack for the project. How I see this is the program gathers all the necessary info held in the project and places it all into one file< rather like a compressed folder, that can be then taken and put onto any other pc with the Ableton program and install the live pack there to use at will.

The manage set tool is very much like the previous explained management tools, you can locate missing samples and have the option to collect all samples into that particular live set for ease of use.

Palestine, at this writing, holds one Israeli soldier. Israel illegally holds ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners, including children, democratically elected members of the Palestinian government, and mere family members of those sought. Many of these prisoners are tortured, and some “disappear”. The US media remain mute about this. Whereas these kidnappings are contrary to international law, Palestine’s holding of one Israeli soldier is in fact legal, as he is a soldier in an occupying military.

To make an implicit link between bigotry against Jews and the actions of the government of the nation-state of Israel, is not only intellectually preposterous, but indeed, as we will see, is itself anti-Jewish, and trivializes true anti-Semitism. The facts and arguments of the political situation either stand or fall on their own merits, period.
Those who attempt to silence criticism of Israel by stigmatizing it as anti-Semitic corner themselves into a quandary, because if Judaism and the government of Israel are implicitly linked, then Judaism is also culpable for any crimes committed by Israel. In other words, to link criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism is to engage in precisely the same racist logic as the bigots who blame Jews, rather than Israel, for the actions of that government. Shielding Israel’s leaders from legitimate criticism is also harmful to Israel itself, as it enables them to drag their nation further into strategic and moral catastrophe.
It should also be noted that some of the most vocal opponents of Israeli policy, most important scholars, human rights workers, and witnesses, are Jews and Israelis, including the children of Holocaust survivors. The prejudicing of honest debate about Israel and Palestine by labeling defenders of Palestine as anti-Semitic must be exposed for the cheap political ploy it is.

This is the Info View, it is located in the bottom left of the screen. It is a very useful tool, especially when new to using Ableton or have simply forgotten certain aspects of using the programme. If you hover over any part of the screen it gives a brief description of that part of the screen and what it does. For a more detailed description though it is wiser to look in the manual to really understand the utilities, the info view is more of a prompt tool.

I added these two processors to the master track to effect every track at will. These processors are used when it comes to performing the set live to add variation to the overall sound. The redux is set to change the Downsample rate using a dial on the midi keyboard and limited so the sound isn’t completely destroyed. The EQ3 is also linked to the midi keyboard dials for the frequency low and high dials, also limited so as not to make a mess of the sound during the performance. In essence the EQ3 literally filters out either the low or high frequencies depending on where I set the dials to, giving me the ability to create more alternate sections within the main scenes, maybe to create a 2 second lull before cranking the dials back up to kick back in with the full sound.

I went into the Live devices browser and selected audio effects and chose the basic eq3 effect, clicked and held it, then drag over to the master channel to activate it’s use only on the master channel. I have set up the midi keyboard as explained above to use the keyboards dials to alter the processors dials, also a some of the keys are used to turn the devices on or off.

For one of my other track I created a sound which is similar to some form of radio interference using the operator. To get the sound created I was a simple case of trial and error, altering modulation levels, auto panning and playing with the oscillator controls, the levels and the waveform it should us which were, osc a- saw4, osc b- noise, osc c- sine e and osc d- square 3.

The instrument I focused the most on was the sampler of which I explain in detail in blog #3