Flow + the Ableton beast

Well what to say about Ableton Live?

It is an impressive and difficult beast.

Ableton Live can produce some incredible music, filled with artistry. It offers a huge amount of possibilities and potential.

So understandably it is a complex piece of software, yet it feels like nothing has been done to make it user-friendly. Like it was specifically designed to be exclusive.

In many ways, perfect for capitalism. Buy Ableton Live, realise you can’t access or understand most of its functions, spend hours trying to figure it with help from the internet, its not enough, buy a course, learn more, buy another course and somewhere in there make some music, try to sell the music because you’d like to make more and continue paying for Ableton Live…

Here are some thoughts from my first experience, with a future classroom scenario in mind.

1.      The students may have a much better understanding of the software than I do. They may be able to teach other students and me!

2.      As in life, people have a variety of understandings, existing knowledge, learning and move at different speeds. Whether you’re a pre-service teacher or a school student some may have prior experience and can quickly produce something, whereas others may need more assistance and take longer to make something.

3.      The school may not be able to afford Ableton Live, so perhaps it would be another (hopefully user-friendly) DAW.

4.      Better yet, Ableton Live is free to all learning organisations offering creative arts and has become more user-friendly!

When making my first track, I found a free sample I liked available on the Ableton Live trial to set the tone. Next a percussion sample and added that as my drums. Thinking that was pretty much done. I played it to a friend, who couldn’t hear the bass line at all, which helped me realise that the audio levels were not balanced. So I spent 15minutes trying to figure out how to adjust the gain. I’d made some changes and thought that was enough. Then had a quick look at the rubric and thinking it was due before our next seminar, chose to forgo the bonus point for doing 4 x 8 bar/measure phrases, looked up on YouTube how to export and convert it to an mp3. Ended up with an old pal (Audacity) for mp3 conversion and submitted it.

Have a listen here:

Arriving in week 2’s seminar, realising we could continue working on the track with further knowledge and assistance, left me feeling foolish for being impatient. However our fab lecturer Caitlin and I struggled to make my Microsoft laptop and Ableton Live 1 play nicely. It was clearly designed to work optimally on a Mac, another barrier and exclusionary aspect to Ableton Live.

Onto some reading reflection.

Chapter 1 'Toward a Creative Music Curriculum', Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity (New York, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Nov. 2021), “A student who has made a playlist in iTunes or Spotify has already experienced a form of musical creativity.” Kuhn and Hein succinctly legitimise an area of creativity so many people disregard - I LOVE IT and look forward to implementing this in future classrooms!

“Student-led creativity is highly congenial to flow.” TICK, I'm in agreement with this, having experienced it both as a student and an educator.

Kuhn and Hein's idea that “Music-induced flow unifies the individual with the social.” is an interesting concept in relation to their work. While I would agree this can happen when working on group projects using technology or listening to music together, my lived-experience finds it to be the opposite for individual music making. Oftentimes any attempt at being social while in the flow of music making can disrupt or destroy the flow completely. Individuals perhaps share a similar experience of the flow state if they are working independently side by side but I would argue this is more like the same thing happening in silo in the electronic music making world.

Listening to music has got to be one of the greatest pleasures in life. Kuhn and Hein put forward that “Students who learn to listen actively and critically to recordings can use that same skill to listen in ensembles.” This really struck me as I'd never considered it before. Being able to identify different sounds, tone colours, whether volume levels make a song feel balanced or not are incredibly useful for ensemble playing. Something that can be done alone before approaching ensemble work, or better yet, alongside it.

Another quote that has stuck with me is from Snyder, B. (2000). Music and memory: An introduction. MIT Press.

“The key to effective music learning is “chunking,” breaking a long piece into short, tractable segments and then building those segments into larger meta-segments".

Discussion of electronic music built from looped chunks the chapter, made me think of Gestalt language learners, gaining understanding by learning a short phrase or chunk rather than individual words. I also feel the building from chunks could be a generalisation but likely the most common evolution of electronic sounds in song.

Interesting that Kuhn and Hein state “Ableton Live an ideal tool for chunking and looping recordings and MIDI.” Ideal is certainly not the word I would use as a new user of Ableton. It is an impressive beast, with so many clever tools within it but it is not particularly intuitive or user-friendly. There is an element of exclusivity to being able to fully use Ableton Live. However it turns out there are also other more accessible tools provided by Ableton, that of this which will be great for in class activities like https://learningmusic.ableton.com/the-playground.html

“Constructivist methodology doesn’t require the teacher to be a subject matter expert. Learning alongside students is an excellent teaching method, provided that the teacher exercises openness, curiosity, and vulnerability as a learner.”

What a delightful and exciting sentiment. Being able to guide your students, while learning alongside them is a gift. Which sits in line with the just-in-time-theory/just-in-time-learning/just-in-time-teaching - a natural companion to electronic music making thanks to the enormity of information available at the touch of a screen or Hey Siri/Alexa/Google etc.

Now some other good news - The second Season of Rhythm + Flow is coming to Netflix with Latto as a judge!!!!