Ingest Some Organic Matter
If you're making computer-based music, the best results always come from taking your stuff out of where you started.
By this, I mean, if you make a jam on Ableton, take it out of there somehow. Try to play it on guitar, or bounce it to the SP-404, or bounce it to some other ridiculous thing. Or try to play it on drums, or maybe dust off the piccolo.
There's so many videos and chit-chats out there about how to bust out of the four-bar loop, but you have to ingest some kind of organic matter somewhere and cross through some wires.
This is top of mind because we are deep in the throes of a songwriting semester for my group, and although I've tried to be more typical, I just can't do it.
Mainly because there's been a Sting update, and the things that you can do with it are now more in line with what I want to do, and it's all Ableton-based.
And I've been really fascinated with my computer + the SP-404MKII + one of my two live basses. I just think it's the coolest combination.
And I've been trying to do typical songs on it, but really what I need to do is just the old jam-a-day, and keep going and build up about 20 tracks. Because I think this ultimately will equal something that's releasable. At least by my standards, if you know what I mean.
So for this week's track, called “Thermonuclear War”—SoundCloud link here—I bounce back and forth from Sting in kind of its bass-plus-two-acid-lines mode (Counterpoint). One cool little drum loop, take out the drums, put some effects from SP-404, and then, like, play live bass for 10 minutes, put it back into Ableton, chop it up, send it back to the SP-404 with some relevant Isaac Asimov quotes, and then, voilà, you have a track.
This, to me, seems like an infinite way to make music, which is always my thing. Everything in my life is: Is this repeatable/is it worth doing over and over?
Because you can then kind of get to that point where you've gotten the most out of it you possibly can. And that's super fun.
I gave myself permission to stop writing songs and get more pieces of antsy-fartsy out there, and I feel like this is very close.
Obviously there's some mistakes and stuff I'd change, but in large part, I'm really happy with this.
And it's based around two chord sequences, looping, chopping, heavy effects, and live, unquantized bass.
And also, when you're chopping this stuff up, you kind of always don't really chop on the one, because it's all in time, but one big audio file. And there's no way to quantize my bass either, because that's coming through the SP-404. So while it's completely computer-based electronic, it's also super organic, or organic-like. And a guy like me will move on before perfect even starts to drift into the picture.
Preserve the moment.
And obviously, there's got to be some way to do this on a stage, but whether someone would come and actually watch and listen is a whole other story—and possibly about 100 posts.