This week presented some logistical hurdles. I had some vacation days sprinkled in, but not the kind where I had any large chunks of free time. And when I did have a moment to fire up my system, my Push 2 started acting up. All of the parameters were jumping around as if I were rapidly turning all of the knobs at once. There was no way to work in the software like this, so I had to spend time troubleshooting and even went out and bought a new USB cable. After none of that worked, I simply uninstalled and reinstalled Live. That seems to have resolved my issue. I did have the Live 12 beta installed on my machine, so I assume there must have been a bug that will be resolved before the release. In any event, that whole episode cut at least one music-making session out of this week compared to what I have done during the prior seven weeks. Once I did get my Push back on track, I realized I lost my template set I usually start from during the reinstallation. I didn’t feel like setting up a new template yet, so I just worked with a stock drum rack and built up a beat. The parts sounded fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to love any of the samples, so I ended up breaking out each note pattern in the beat to ten separate MIDI clips, created a new track for each one, added a Simpler device to each track and replaced each sample. It was tedious, but I like the drum sounds much better. I composed the bass, pads, chords, stabs and arpeggiated keys all on the Push using the scale mode to remain in G# major, and then moved over to my computer to start coming up with combinations of parts in Session View. Once I had a rough song structure, I flipped to Arrangement View and started to refine the flow of the song. There aren’t very many parts to this song, but that was intentional. I wanted something simpler, shorter and more minimal than what I created in past weeks.

Tags: week 8 2024, View by:thgirwnhoj